My old home town looks much the same - at first. There's the castle, right in the middle, where it's been since Roman times, and next to it the stately civic centre, chiselled from white stone in the days when coal was king. But Cardiff, now celebrating its 100th year as a city and 50th as Welsh capital, is a very different city from the one I left decades ago. Slouching down Kingsway, past the new Hilton, I glance left and right for sightings of the familiar and the strange. Stretching away to my left, the shops of Queen Street look the same, only different: glitzier, no traffic, a brightly-lit carousel in the middle of the pedestrian precinct. Just ahead of me rises the grey tower of Saint John's church and, facing it, a curved cement and glass frontage of unmistakeable Sixties vintage. Ah, yes, the ale-house I used to frequent as a teenager, the Owain Glyndwr, named after the Welsh national hero and themed for sport, with curved wood bays and banks of television screens. Except in my day it was the Buccaneer, dim and decked out like a galleon, with nets and dark, heavy beams.
I smiled at the recollection later, as I sipped a glass of Warsteiner in the sleek etched-glass surroundings of the Copa bar. A youthful career in beer had begun in the Buccaneer days - or even earlier. Dark frothing liquid served in pint glasses beneath a huge painted plaster cast of the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe… that was the Sarsaparilla Shop, a thrilling place where boys could guzzle a syrupy drink resembling beer. The Sarsaparilla Shop had long ago become a boutique. But whatever happened to the seven-foot grizzly bear that reared from the doorway of the tobacco shop, on the corner of the Prince of Wales Theatre? Stuffed, scuffed and balding, it nevertheless scared the life out of kids as they turned that corner. I continued down St Mary Street. Good news - the Brains Brewery is still in town, albeit relocated a few hundred yards away, its slogan of "It's Brains you want!" still pithily relevant. The Hard Rock Café, Chiquitos and La Tasca now occupy the lively Old Brewery Quarter, where Brains formerly brewed.
The food plaza spills onto an old alleyway that ran the length of the brewery's back wall. Chip Alley, now paved, pedestrianised and relieved of its oppressive brick wall, has diversified from end-to-end chippies to embrace the world of kebabs. Caroline Street, to give it its proper name, is still a scene of grease, booze and mayhem late at night. I checked on this, and can confirm that its boisterous Faliraki-on-Taff notoriety remains intact, even enhanced by the recent improvements. There is a graveyard in the middle of the city between St John's Church and the old library, a fine Victorian pile where my mother used to work, now converted to a visitor centre. Paved for pedestrians, this modest haven has been the soul of the city since the Middle Ages. To one side is Cardiff Market, its stalls as abundant as an Eastern bazaar, a faintly exotic effect enhanced by the oriental lanterns overhead. On the opposite side of the graveyard is the newish St David's Centre, an international concert hall and a shopping mall with a statue immortalising Gareth Edwards, scrum-half par excellence.
Here in a small radius are commerce, sport and culture, the three pillars on which the modern city stands. I ponder this bit of wisdom, but not for long, because it's Brains I want, really, and I can get some just around the corner at the Old Arcade. A tavern that has altered little, still with the dark wood panels, the plate glass mirrors and framed rugby shirts of yesteryear. I repair there for a refreshing pint of Dark - Daaahk, as we relish saying in the local vernacular. The city centre stands on the east bank of the River Taff, notorious for flooding until it was straightened by Brunel, and still inclined to the occasional inundation. On low ground between the river and the old town quay there once stood an inn called the Cardiff Arms. A long time ago it was demolished to make way for a rugby ground -Cardiff Arms Park. It was later rebuilt as the National Stadium, and then rebuilt again as the Millennium Stadium. All three I have known, and the last of them, a shining galactic battleship between the Taff and the town, is the most startling.
Like its predecessors, it is a looming presence in the city centre. You catch glimpses of it through chinks in narrow streets or in gaps between pubs. Between the castle and the river, the castle grounds are to Cardiff what Central Park is to New York - only better. The cultured, cultivated landscape stretches northward for miles, with views of the river and the distant hills. My route, though, is a short one. Around the back of the castle, across the filled-in Glamorgan Canal, where, my father tells me, boys used to jump in for coins thrown by passengers waiting for a tram or trolley. Then beneath the thoroughfare of Kingsway and on to the civic centre. On past the law courts and the city hall to the third of the civic triumvirate, the Museum of Wales. A Turner exhibition showing there includes the artist's watercolour of Cowbridge Road and Cardiff Castle in 1795.Before we teenagers frequented pubs we reckoned - wrongly - that the museum was a good place to meet girls. Perhaps the futility of our quest explains why I had never before visited the art galleries on the upper floor - a shame, because I would have discovered a unique collection of French Impressionist paintings.
In galleries 12 and 13 are many works by Monet, Cézanne and Rodin, most of them bequeathed by the Davies sisters, Gwendoline and Margaret, who inherited a fortune and patronised the arts, to the great benefit of the nation.Welshness used to be suppressed or overwhelmed in the capital. Seldom was the native language heard in its streets, but this is no longer the case. I heard Welsh spoken in the Armless Dragon (a charming and intimate restaurant in the student district of Cathays), in the urbane Copa bar, and throughout Chapter, the arts centre that occupies a former school off the Cowbridge road in Canton. Pontcanna district is a now a citadel of Welsh cognoscenti and at Clwb Ifor Bach (Little Ivor's Place), on Womanby Street by the castle, even the bouncers speak Welsh. In its hurtling career into the future, Cardiff is also uncovering its roots and its heritage.Nowhere is this more apparent than in Cardiff Bay, the regenerated former dockland a mile south of the town. I walked down Lloyd George Avenue, a new but disappointingly drab boulevard, and quickly opted to cross the tracks to the once-notorious Bute Street, where at least there was life amid the run-down public housing.
I then crossed to the seawater lagoon created by a barrage built across the estuary. Here the old industrial waterfront is colonised by an incoherent but lively clutter of restaurants, clubs and boutiques as well as Techniquest, a hands-on science attraction. There is an invigorating feel to the boardwalks and precincts of The Bay. Freshly emerged from the builders' scaffolding is the Welsh Millennium Centre, an ambitious venue that aspires to do for Cardiff what the Opera House did for Sydney. A glinting giant's dolmen of an edifice, carved with monumental Welsh runes, it is a potent symbol of Cardiff's growing stature and confidence. But my favourite corner of this district - once called Tiger Bay - is decaying Mountstuart Square. Here the grand Baltic House and Perch Buildings are dwarfed by the bloated Coal Exchange, whose exquisitely lugubrious dealing hall is now a venue for boxing and music concerts. Cardiff is great for shopping. I browsed at length in Troutmark Books in Castle Arcade.
Cardiff has a dozen or so of these Victorian emporia, each snaking for hundreds of yards through city blocks. With their painted woodwork and hanging lanterns, they are a marvel, and I doubt that there is anywhere in Britain that could match Cardiff for the extent and variety of its arcades.Castle Arcade is my favourite. There's a violin maker on the upper balcony and a martial arts supplier below. There's a wigmaker, a surfers' supply shop and a studio called Taglia Telly. At one end is a tiny café, with a tangle of steep stairways, called Celtic Cauldron, where I slurped a bowl of cawl, a Welsh lamb stew. Two Japanese girls on the next table ordered cawl and "Welsh beer" in high-pitched English. The waitress brought a couple of bottles of Cobra and the Japanese dissolved in a fit of giggles when they read "Made in India" on the label. I chirped: "It's Brains you want!" They looked at me as if I was daft or something.At the far end of town there is another arcade, the Wyndham. I noticed AE Lloyd, the tobacco shop, and stooped to look at boxes of Cuban cigars with colourful labels, and jars of specialist tobacco such as "Mr Darby's Sunday Fantasy".