As the tickertape settles in the aftermath of Geraint Thomas’s excellent celebratory parade in Cardiff for winning the Tour de France it has made me wonder about the impact that celebrities and sporting teams have on their home city. One of a plethora of former students of a city High School which also had Wales…

In the business improvement district world we talk a lot about place identity, place branding, place unique-ness although I tend to avoid that last one because it’s pretty hard to say. Some places have it easy: draw a three second sketch of the Eiffel Tower and you’ve summoned the image of Paris, if you’ve ever…

Cardiff, god love it, has a bit of a reputation. I spent three years living in the South of England and telling people I went to Cardiff Uni and they would pull a knowing face. When I started telling those same people I was moving back to The Capital of Cymru they pulled offered me…

Back in the day, aka the late 90s, my sister and I were sent gift vouchers from the aunts and uncles we didn’t see at Christmas. In particular I remember bright orange ones we would spend in WH Smith on Goosebumps books and B*Witched cassettes (I was not lying about the 90s). There was no…

This morning I returned to the office after a few days away at the Institute of Place Management’s biennial conference. After the standard return to work procedure of being horrified by how much paper had I left all over my desk, sifting through the emails that I couldn’t respond to on the fly, and attempting…

Frankly you don’t want to sit next to a BID professional at a dinner party, someone will ask them ‘so what do you do?’ and you will have to listen a long winded and apologetic explanation about hereditaments and additionality when really what you were expecting was, ‘I’m an oboe teacher,’ or, ‘I recently took…

Does anybody ever get over the nostalgia for the six-week summer holidays? The last time I had more than two uninterrupted weeks away from work I was 16 but I still find myself thinking back to summer days waking up with weeks unplanned time stretching out in front of me – the main concern in…

There’s a lot of ‘this time last year’ about as we pass the anniversary of a certain referendum and the political fallout that accompanied it. Here in the Cardiff BID office though there is a local and less complex one year on to look back on – a year has passed since the successful ballot…

It’s hard to move in Cardiff without encountering the words Champions League – it seems that every leaflet printed, window washed, or conversation carried out between strangers is somehow linked back to June and the road to Cardiff. In an effort to tone down the constant flood of UEFA preparations news we bundled all of…

Precisely how the internet works is not something I have given a huge amount of thought to. I might have spent a moment amazed that twenty-first century children will never hear the legendary dialling tone and if push comes to shove I suppose I’ve been shocked at how quickly we seem to have got this…