Butetown has changed hugely since Bert Hardy took photographs for the Picture Post during the 1950s, but religion ensures that the community spirit is still alive.
Walking south from the mad hubbub of Cardiff City Centre, leaving behind the new £675m St David’s 2 shopping centre, you go under the main London-to-Swansea trainline and into silence.
Bute Street, where you find yourself, is so quiet during the day – a characteristic that you don’t fully notice until you walk the full length of the street into the new and noisy Cardiff Bay development at the other end.
There, business people walk around in pairs or threes looking important and completely at ease in the expensive environment of glass-fronted shops and restaurants. Tourists wander aimlessly and contently, pausing occasionally to admire the bronze statues that evoke a vague sense of the Bay’s former industrial glory.
A pleasure boat captain implores people to take a 30 minute cruise round the bay: “You’ll have the whole boat to yourself in the sunshine if you come now and the company of a very handsome and knowledgeable captain,” he quips through a loudhailer. “Don’t just look at the Bay, have a guided tour round it.”
Back on Bute Street, the only noise is an occasional bus or car and the slow shuffle of an elderly lady clutching a tatty bag filled with a week’s worth of shopping. There is life, of course, but it’s hidden away in houses and flats – a far cry from when ‘Tiger Bay’, as it was known, was the most ethnically diverse place in the UK where people from all over the world mixed freely in the streets, pubs and cafes.
What was once a vibrant and lively home for the dock workers, who maintained Cardiff’s position at the forefront of the world’s coal and steel industries, now seems to be little more than a side street. However, there is one thing that ensures Butetown still retains some of the old sense of community that is now much depleted: religion.
Capturing a rare sight
Image 1 (see below)
When Bert Hardy took the above photograph of the inside of a Mosque for his collection of photographs based around Cardiff Bay for the Picture Post in the 1950s, he captured what was at the time a fairly rare sight in the UK.
Back then, Butetown was the most racially harmonious place to live in the country and Cardiff was the centre for the Islamic faith in Britain. Shaikh Said Hassan Ismail, the Imam of the Dock Mosque on Alice Street who moved to the bay in 1940, says: “We used to go to Christian gatherings and [Christians] used to come to Islamic gatherings and we didn’t feel out of place. We used to go into African houses, Jamaican houses, and… we used to eat together. [The] women used to stand on the door yap, yap, yapping. There was a proper brotherhood atmosphere.”
Since Hardy’s photograph, Tiger Bay has been redeveloped with great towering flats replacing the old terraced houses. This and the huge loss of jobs after the collapse of the coal industry fundamentally changed the area
Sheikh Said explains: “People were just in the flats and nobody spoke to anybody else. Once you get into the flat… you end up in a coop like a chicken. It changed the atmosphere of the whole community. It’s a much more quiet place to live in now. There’s not as much activity as there [was].”
Father Graham Francis, the priest of St Mary’s church situated in the north of Butetown, agrees: “[The redevelopment] destroyed a very special community.”
Image 2 (see below)
The importance of faith
Despite this, the Bay’s religions continue to ensure that at least some resemblance of that old community survives. Father Francis says that the church is a meeting point for old docks people: “The congregation is made up of a few people who live locally and are sort of attached to St Mary’s, but then there’s lots of people who used to live [in Tiger Bay] who now live in other parts of Cardiff and drive in.”
He explains: “When you have a funeral you have huge crowds of people coming from all over Cardiff because it’s like the old docks community, one of the few occasions they have that they can all come together again. Even if it’s raining at the end of the service, when you come out, they’re all standing in the car park for ages and ages, all talking and catching up on things.”
Sheikh Said thinks that faith is the Bay’s key link to the community spirit of the past: “That’s what brings us together. That’s what keeps us together. Our meeting place is the Mosque. We have our marriages in the Mosque, we teach our children in the Mosque, we pray in the Mosque and we argue in the Mosque,” he says laughing.
Father Francis says that the cohesion between the community’s faiths has continued because of the area’s special history: “There is no antagonism between faiths because it’s such a long, long time that the Bay has been a multi-faith community and we’ve all lived together for such a long time. I would think that if anyone were to come to Butetown and try and stir up anything between faiths… people would just tell them that that sort of thing doesn’t happen here.”
The future
The furniture of the Bay will soon change once more – Cardiff Council has initiated the regeneration of Loudoun Square with the building of a new shopping parade, houses and a community centre. The eerie quiet that currently pervades Tiger Bay may disappear as a result, but religion will keep the community together and Butetown’s history will remain in the minds of its people. “Butetown is a way of life,” says Sheikh Said. “If you’ve lived down Butetown then you’ve got a way of life that you’ll never forget. Never forget.”
The soundfile below is a short excerpt of the interview with Sheikh Said:
Image 1: Bert Hardy’s photograph of the inside of a mosque in Butetown. Published in Down the Bay: Picture Post, Humanist Photography and Images of 1950s Cardiff
Image 2: The inside of St Mary’s Church in Butetown, January 2010
Love this Andrew – very nicely handled. Hope you got permission to reproduce the Bert Hardy photo…