In days past the area around the docks was one of the least salubrious parts of a city. It had homes for the impoverished dock workers and immigrants fresh off the boats; it had the inevitable red light district. Most coastal cities had a place like this. These days, however, what few docks there are take the form of highly mechanized container ports. The majority of cities have identified the old dockyard region as a valuable piece of seafront real estate that can be transformed into an urban entertainment complex.

My grandfather’s ship was based out of Cardiff, so he must have spent a fair amount of time at the docks. However, he died long before I was born, and when I was a kid Tiger Bay was known only as a bad part of town, and the home of the most famous Welshwoman of the time, the divine Shirley Bassey. That’s all changed. With devolution came money, renewed civic pride, and a need for impressive new national buildings. Thus Tiger Bay became Cardiff Bay, the location of the National Assembly building and so much more. I have never liked the re-naming, but I must say that the place does look rather nice these days.

I was there yesterday for the opening of a Welsh LGBT History exhibition staged by the fine folks from the LGBT Excellence Centre. I won’t say much about the exhibition itself, because my colleagues and I at Out Stories Bristol are planning a similar event for next year and they’ve asked me not to give my views on the Cardiff exhibition until they have had a chance to look at it. I can, however, comment on the event itself, and the location.

The exhibition is in the Pierhead Building, a delightfully crazy piece of Victorian extravagance that is now a small museum of Welsh identity. The photos below show details of the building and some of the non-LGBT elements on display. If you are interested in learning more about the ancient legal code of Wales, the BBC has an interesting post here.

Special guests for the day were Sarah, Fox, Karen and Donna from the My Transsexual Summer TV series. I’m delighted to report that they are all just as nice in person as they seemed on screen. They have also grown into magnificent ambassadors for the trans community and I’m proud to have met them. They gave an excellent interview and Q&A session.

The other main event for the day was a performance of Not About Heroes, a two-person play by Stephen McDonald detailing the relationship between the WWI poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. It was a very powerful piece, and got me thinking a lot about the very different war I have been writing about. There may be a separate blog post about this at some point if I think I can do it justice.

I also spent a bit for time wandering around the Bay taking photos. It is a very science fictional location. The BBC Wales studios, where Doctor Who is filmed, are not far away, and parts of Mermaid Quay have been used for sets in Torchwood. Indeed, one of the main sites of interest at the Quay is the Torchwood HQ and associated shrine to Ianto Jones. That’s quite a memorial for a fictional character. The location also memorializes Cardiff’s most well-known contributor to the arts of speculative fiction, Roald Dahl.

One of the things that impressed me most about the day was the multicultural nature of the event, and of the city. LGBTEC is a thoroughly diverse organization. The event was chaired by Federico Podeschi, who sounds quite Welsh despite his name. I met a PoC trans woman who was born in the Sudan. There were also people with clear connections to the Spanish-speaking world. Dahl, of course, was the child of Norwegian immigrants. The church that the Norwegians built for themselves can still be seen across the Bay. And on Mermaid Quay there is a statue of a young couple enjoying the view. The young man looks like he might be a dock worker with a lengthy local ancestry. His partner looks like her family came to Cardiff via the Caribbean or Africa. But the title of the sculpture is “People Like Us”. It is a very conscious statement of the multicultural nature of modern Welsh society.

Here are the photos. There are three pages of them, so single-click on the picture and then keep clicking “next”.

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