Tiger Bay

On Sunday, a rather frigid day, as winter has struck Wales and the U.K. with a hammer blow, I walked down to Cardiff Bay as I hadn't been there in awhile and it is one of my favourite places.

I wandered into the Pierhead Building, a striking, imposing red brick structure on the waterfront and encountered a little museum that answered a lot of my wonderings about the building and Cardiff's industrial past.

Before shipping and coal collapsed and before the Bay was rebuilt as a stunning tourist destination the Docks and the area surrounding it were known as Tiger Bay.

I remember that name from an old British film with Hayley Mills that I saw as a child, one of the first of the wave of British gritty 60s films which also included A Taste of Honey. Those movies, in black and white, reeked of grey, industrial Britain. I only realized a few years ago that the Tiger Bay in the film was a real place, part of Cardiff.

The museum had first-person recollections from a vast number of Cardiffians and Welsh, but the ones I found most striking were from two men.

One, a man of colour, spoke of the 'heaven' that was the Tiger Bay in which he grew up. Everywhere were sailors and merchants from the four corners of the Earth, and anywhere you went you could hear people talking in their various native tongues: Chinese, Spanish, Welsh, English. Many of the men settled in Cardiff and, as the man said with pride, "All of our grandmothers were Welsh girls." Families, he said, were like rainbows, and he wished he could show you the Tiger Bay of his youth.

Another man, a Somali, told a sadder story. He spoke about how hard it was for the Somali sailors away from home, often only able to bath once a week, staying in squalid conditions and spending all of their money on clothes, just to feel good.

Tiger Bay has been demolished and the area gentrified, but the sense of it still tugs and pulls, not unlike the tides on Bristol Channel.