Cardiff Central

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CARDIFF CENTRAL – CANOL CAERDYDD

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Cardiff Central covers the heart of the Welsh Capital; its City Centre, transport hubs and many of its main attractions. However, within its boundaries is a land of contrasts, which may explain its historic volatility.

In the south of the constituency is Cardiff City Centre, which features the main shopping hubs of Queen’s Street, St. Mary’s Street and St. David’s Shopping Centre, as well as Cardiff Castle, the southern end of Bute Park, the National Museum of Wales and the Principality Stadium. BBC Wales’ new headquarters recently opened on the site of the old Coach Station. The Universities of Cardiff and South Wales are based here (Cardiff Met is in Cardiff West) therefore the constituency has a large student population, primarily based in and around Cathays. Beyond the immediate City Centre is Roath, home to a mixed community of young professionals, a proportion of south Asians (most visible along City Road) and an increasing student population in recent years. Roath also gives its name to the other large park in this constituency, which stretches northwards. The area around Roath Park and neighbouring Cyncoed are the most affluent parts of the constituency and Cardiff as a whole, with large owner-occupied detached houses abundant. In contrast, Llanedeyrn is dominated by 1960’s housing estates featuring a mostly white working-class population while Adamsdown features much cheaper compact terraced housing squeezed between Newport Road and the Great Western Mainline and a signifcant proportion of ethnic minorities.

The Cardiff Central parliamentary constituency was recreated for the 1983 election, which the incumbent Conservative MP for Cardiff North, Ian Grist won over evenly split opposition. Labour and the Liberals swapped 2nd and 3rd places in a much closer three-way contest in 1987. Grist was defeated by Labour’s Jon Owen Jones in 1992, who held the seat for 13 years but never comfortably, his largest majority was nearly 8,000 over the Liberal Democrats in the 1997 landslide. The Lib Dems gained the seat in 2005, one of a number of ‘student’ seats they gained in an election where the party made abolition of tuition fees and opposition to the Iraq War key policy positions. Jenny Willott served as MP for two terms, losing her seat to Labour in the Lib Dem collapse of 2015. Jo Stevens has been the MP since and currently serves in the Shadow Cabinet. Labour support in the constituency has strengthened since 2015, consolidating its position amongst student voters and pro-Europeans (Stevens herself has stood for anti-Brexit positions in the Commons, defying the Labour Whip on occasions during the 2015 and 2017 Parliaments). At the 2019 election, Cardiff Central returned the largest Labour majority in Wales, a scenario that would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago.

[𝐍𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐖𝐞𝐬𝐭]

It's probably worth mentioning that Cardiff Central is the clear successor to the Cardiff North that existed until the 1983 election (the constituency now called Cardiff North was then Cardiff North West). It still stretches all the way out to Pentwyn (which is a markedly more mid-market sort of estate than Llanedeyrn).

And 2005 was more about Penylan and Cyncoed (the upper middle class bits) voting tactically – centre-left-ish voters wanting to punish Labour for Iraq and centre-right-ish ones spotting an opportunity to kick the Socialists when they were down – than the vagaries of student politics and low turnouts despite lots of noise at the inner end of the seat. This one is just that typical pattern of well-off inner suburbs in metropolitan areas that used to be solidly Tory shifting gradually over the past few decades, first to the Lib Dems as a sort of protest halfway house, and then to Labour. These areas are also home to most of Wales' tiny number of Jews if we're doing an ethnic survey.

Adamsdown may be a good place to move to if you intend to get burgled, especially as one gets nearer to the prison (cause and effect?) – it's the sort of place that people move away from quickly. It isn't really a markedly ethnic minority area in anything more than the sense that the general picture in Wales is so monolithically white that any area with a somewhat transitory population will stand out. This is also distorted by a few expensive private halls of residence (whose owners don't much worry about burglary) that naturally show up as having a large proprtion of people of Chinese and Arab origin. It's mainly the sort of area in which one finds a typical mix of urbanites (about two-thirds of whom will be white) who have not yet moved somewhere else.

With City Road, yes, you do get a lot of people of Bangladeshi ancestry on the east side, but the west side was historically Irish, and perhaps unsurprisingly now has a lot of Polish people amid the ongoing spread of HMOs.