HE EXHALES
Seriously high now.
Oh, that's a wobbly one.
40m now, I reckon.
I can see the cab above me.
What an office that is.
I can see the sea.
'I'm climbing 200 foot to the top of
'a huge crane in the centre of Cardiff.'
This is the last 5m, before the very top.
Just got to straddle my way across here.
Get past this point.
Hello.
You all right, mate?
Wow.
He's just turning it around for a better view,
but he warned us to hold on cos it gets a little bit juddery.
So I'm holding on!
I'm on the building site of the new BBC Wales headquarters
and it's the biggest construction project in the city.
This is a perfect example of how this city is constantly evolving.
Billions of pounds will soon be spent on redevelopment.
It's one of the UK's fastest-growing cities.
But sometimes I feel that this place is a little bit too quick
to forget its past.
I want to learn about those little pieces of history that tell me
all about how Cardiff became the city that it is today.
'My name is Will Millard,
'I'm a writer and an explorer.
'This place is my home, and I love it.'
Great stuff.
I'm going in!
'I'm going to explore how Cardiff grew from
'a tiny, little town into a modern metropolis.'
Ooh, look.
This is something else, down here.
'I've got unprecedented access to places you never get to see,
'and they don't tell the familiar story.'
Oh, my goodness me! Look in this place.
It is satanically dark down there.
Pretty, pretty foreboding.
'I'll be venturing above, below, inside and all around the city.
'It's going to be uncomfortable...'
Wow.
'..exhilarating...
'..and dangerous.'
My heart's starting to go now.
'This is the city as you've never seen it before.
'If you think you know Cardiff then think again.
'It might be our last chance to see some of the history that is
'vanishing right in front of us.'
I'm walked across jungles on my own in Western Africa,
but this is definitely about as scary as it gets for me.
There's not a lot left that predates
the Victorian era in Cardiff.
But the history goes back beyond
the Romans and, for centuries,
it wasn't even a city,
just a tiny trading town.
Hello, Simon, how are you doing?
'I've come to meet artist Simon Fenoulhet.
'He's fascinated by the city's past,
'and he reckons he's found a truly hidden piece of history
'that's remained undiscovered for hundreds of years.'
OK, so why are we here, Simon?
We're in the site of the old Blackfriars Friary,
in the grounds of Cardiff Castle.
And in the 13th century, there were two friaries - one here and
one the other side of the castle, the Greyfriars.
I imagine, back in the 13th century, here,
Cardiff would have looked very different? Completely different.
A very small town, a little over 2,000 people.
I'm still a little bit mystified as to why we're exactly here, though?
It's because I want to show you something I've found.
A stone tunnel which has been hidden for many, many years.
'I can't reveal where Simon is taking me
'because it's on private land and it's also unsafe,
'but it's right in the centre of the city.'
Simon, this is ridiculous.
It's not a very big entrance.
Not a very big entrance? How big were these friars?
They must have been midgets!
Are you telling me that you think that was laid in the 13th century?
Yeah. This is the ancient stonework, here,
you can see at the top, and the walls inside.
And the tunnel goes off
at a very acute angle underneath the ground, over here.
Right, I think I'm going to go in first.
I'm going to grab a camera off James,
so you can see what it's like inside.
Now, come on, Simon, have you got any expert tips for me,
apart from turn on the torch and suck your stomach in?
It's a wriggle to begin with. Once you're inside, you can crawl.
Right, let's turn this on, torches are on.
Oh, my goodness me.
Right.
Right, I'm going for it, guys.
See if I can find the night-vision switch.
There we go. Right.
Oh, good grief.
How are you doing? It is tight.
Simon, I wish I hadn't had
that extra slice of toast for breakfast, mate!
He's in.
Wow.
Christ, he wasn't lying.
Goodness me.
I can't believe those monks would have been using this,
walking down it.
It's a lot longer than I was expecting as well.
These aren't built for the modern man.
6' 1" of me is really struggling here.
Ah.
You can see here, either the roof's fallen in, or the ground's come up.
I think I'm going to see if I can get over it, actually.
See if I can get over that.
Wow.
This is seriously...
seriously tight.
Over this collapsed mound.
PHONE RINGS Oh, no.
My phone's going off.
Yeah, all good. All good.
I'm just having a look over the mound.
My back is pinned against this
13th-century stone wall ceiling.
HE LAUGHS
My hood... My hood's caught on the roof!
HE GRUNTS
OK, I'm in. I'm over.
That's definitely as far as I can go.
It's completely collapsed beyond this mound.
Ah, you right behind me, mate?
Honestly, Simon, I don't know what to say. What a discovery.
What an incredible, incredible piece of history.
Nothing was built here, since the time of the Greyfriars,
until the 1960s. Right.
So, whatever's here's got to be really old.
What on earth was it being used for?
Well, that's the big question, isn't it?
Lots of people think it could have been some sort of escape tunnel,
because it goes directly to the castle from here.
It's a nice thought,
but I wonder if it's more likely to be something like water supply.
Right. But it's nice thought to think it could be an escape route
if the castle was under siege, for example. Sure.
It's impossible to know have far this tunnel goes past that collapse,
but I can't help but wonder how many more like this
might be hidden under Cardiff?
Like Simon said, back in medieval times,
Cardiff was just a small town,
and it remained like that for hundreds of years,
a rather unremarkable place.
But then, things really began to change,
thanks to one super-rich family - the Butes.
For several generations, their extraordinary wealth
completely changed Cardiff's fortunes.
In the late 18th century, the first Marquess inherited his earldom,
acquiring the castle and a lot of its surrounding land.
After the Glamorganshire Canal opened in 1794, Merthyr's
coal and iron could be transported much faster to Cardiff's seaport.
It was the second Marquess of Bute who capitalised on this.
Using the family money, in 1839 he constructed a masonry dock
to handle the hugely increased sea trade,
and where I'm heading next was part of that development.
The canal here is actually a part of Cardiff that I'd like to think
I know quite well.
I used to walk along this canal every day, on my way to work.
And then, much later, I started fishing it quite a lot as well.
But, really, to be perfectly honest, beyond this stretch,
I don't really know were it goes.
So this is about as much as I know.
The canal comes around the corner there,
it forms something of a moat along the castle wall,
and then it gets to this point, and it disappears completely.
And I really have no idea where it goes next.
But I'm hoping to meet a man who does.
Hey, Will. How are you doing?
How are you doing? Callum. Callum Cooper.
Fantastic to meet you, Callum. Great, thank you. Cool.
Where Callum's taking me is not only restricted from the public
but it's also dangerous.
Going in!
Ooh!
God, that smells a bit, doesn't it?
I have never seen the city of Cardiff from this view before.
It's dark, it's quite cold, and half the city's rubbish
has made its way down here, by the looks of things.
When I first came to Cardiff, Callum, I think I just made
the mistake of assuming this was some sort of naturally occurring
canal that ran into a little bit of a moat around the castle.
But, actually, there's much more to it than that, isn't there?
Yeah, I think a lot of people do think that.
But it's a necessary part of operating the docks.
This canal, dock feeder, takes water from Blackweir,
off the River Taff, down to the dock system,
and it keeps the docks topped up with water, so it means we
always can maintain around 39-40 feet of dock level inside the port,
and that's important for shipping.
This canal was built in the 1830s by the Marquess of Bute.
By providing the dock with a continuous water supply,
it allowed ships to load and unload,
even when the tide was out.
It gave Cardiff one of the first
24-hour working docks,
setting the city on its way
to becoming the world's
biggest exporter of coal.
It's quite a place, this, isn't it, Callum? It is.
You'd never know you're right in the city centre, really.
Whoa!
I was nearly in, then!
Who built this, Callum?
During the 1830s, mainly Irish immigrants... Really?
..from Southern Ireland.
They built the feeder, they built the docks,
and this work put bread on their table.
You can imagine, you're leaving Ireland, probably, what,
around the time of the Great Potato Famine,
you come in here, you're looking for work,
and this is the job that you get, digging out this place.
I mean, it's brutal conditions.
It's tough walking down here today, isn't it? Indeed.
But, apart from Callum and the crew, nobody knows we're down here.
And this feels very much like a secret part of the city.
It looks a bit dark and ominous in there. Do you know much
about what's in that tunnel?
My right wader is leaking,
I'm going on the surface route and I'll see you on the other side.
All right, sounds good!
I guess I'm on my own, then.
I don't really know what to expect.
I can tell you now, though, it's actually quite cold in here
now I'm in the dark.
I'm not going to go in alone. I've got my cameras and I've also
got our safety guide, Vasey, who's very kindly agreed to come in.
So I'm going to swap helmets now.
Get the torch on. Hope for the best, isn't it?
Go for it, see what you find.
All right. I'll see you later, lads.
Over 50 million gallons of water run through this canal every day
but Callum has temporarily restricted the flow back at
Blackweir so we can make our way down.
But we haven't got long before the levels rise again.
It's getting deep here.
I'm already well above my belly button.
And you're thinking about the things
that your legs are brushing up against.
Iron rods. Eels.
Maybe there's even some bodies down here, somewhere - who knows?
I can hear cars going over my head.
This is quite something else.
What do you reckon that is, there? Manhole cover? Yeah.
Like you say, there'll be people
putting their feet on there, walking past.
I can't believe I'm right below the centre of the city.
It's an odd mixture of post-war concrete and Victorian construction.
So even down here,
you can see how the modern Cardiff has built over its own past.
The canal runs for over three miles,
much of it hidden under the centre of Cardiff.
It's amazing to think this early 19th-century technology is
still secretly playing a vital role in running the docks today.
It's a very dark, low-looking tunnel over here.
That, that looks eerie.
It's amazing, the dull thud of traffic, we've left that behind now.
It's gone very quiet.
That's one of the city's big pipes.
I don't know whether that's water or sewage or whatever that is.
I think, above me now is actually
the main commercial centre of Cardiff.
I reckon most people shopping and drinking coffee have no idea
that this canal I'm walking down is right under their feet.
Big concrete joists, holding the whole world up above my head.
Stalactites down here as well.
That's awesome.
I mean, that's accumulated there over years and years and years.
We've been walking now for a good 10-15 minutes,
and it's not letting up. It's absolutely pitch-black.
It's nail-straight, though.
As far as the eye can see, there is no daylight.
It is satanically dark down there.
So, I think, unless I'm going to commit to walking all the way
to the docks, this is probably the point I should turn back.
My safety expert tells me the water levels are beginning to rise,
and the current is getting stronger.
It's time to go.
You can really, really feel it in the back of your legs,
walking against it.
I mean, I know on the way back,
how far it is to get back out of here
and to get to relative safety
but I also know that they'll have opened the gates down at
the Blackweir on the Taff now, and this Taff water's coming in.
I certainly wouldn't want to be down here in a storm,
I can tell you that for sure.
Pretty, pretty foreboding.
The key to the entrance where Callum is meeting us
has long since disappeared.
No-one's been down here for years.
Is that you, Will?
Enjoying your journey?
Just got a bit carried away.
Ah.
Out into the sunlight.
What an experience.
Amazing.
The feeder canal flows for over three miles from Blackweir,
in Bute Park, to its final destination at the East Dock.
Today, it's an unassuming lake for local residents.
It's hard to believe now, but in the 19th century,
this place was buzzing.
We can get an idea of what it must have looked like
from this footage from 1930.
The Bute family eventually built four enormous docks,
linked to the valleys' coal seams by a railway network.
With nearly nine million tonnes of coal being exported every year,
it made Cardiff the coal capital of the world.
And it was the Welsh coal that fuelled the British Empire.
The city had become one of Britain's most vital assets,
and it needed to be protected.
I'm taking a boat to find out
how the Victorians did just that.
This is it, I'm off.
Heading out of the Cardiff Bay barrage and into the Severn.
Flat Holm Island is the southernmost point of Wales.
It's also still a part of the city,
and this ancient rock has played a vital role in protecting Cardiff.
Today, you can only visit through a specially organised trip.
But back in the Victorian era, 50 soldiers were stationed here.
Queen Victoria feared a French invasion
and, because of Cardiff's importance to the Empire, in 1866,
Flat Holm was chosen as an artillery defence.
There's an almighty piece of hardware
lying on the grass over here. Look at this.
Look at the size of this cannon!
Goodness knows what that could have been used to take out.
It's a piece of formidable defence.
The shells that went into that must have been quite something.
I imagine gave quite a crack as well.
The shells weighed 115lb,
but they could still hit a target several miles away.
Wow.
I'm going to put my torch on.
These underground passageways would have been a dangerous place,
with soldiers handling hundreds of live shells.
It looks like that would have stored quite a lot of ammunition as well.
There were nine huge cannons housed in separate pits,
but what's most fascinating about these guns is that they disappeared.
Sat on a spring-loaded mounting, when a gun was fired...
..the recoil would force it into the pit, where it could be reloaded.
It made it virtually impossible for enemy ships to spot them.
Ingenious.
Peter Sampson is the Flat Holm Society chairman.
He tells me that, as well as a military defence,
this island had another role in protecting Cardiff.
It's got an ominous presence about it. It certainly has.
The only offshore isolation hospital in the UK.
You're looking at the cholera hospital.
By the mid-19th century in Cardiff,
nearly 1,000 people had died from cholera.
The disease was rife on the Continent,
and with ships from all over the world docking at the port,
the city couldn't risk further outbreaks.
Flat Holm was Cardiff's first line of defence
against the deadly disease.
Infected vessels were ordered to dock at this island.
What was cholera actually like?
As I understand it,
it give you severe vomiting and diarrhoea, and could be deadly.
It's quiet an extreme length to go to, isn't it?
They really must have been terrified.
They were so afraid of it, they made sure that Cardiff would be
safe by bringing the infected people here to the island.
Goodness me, it's really become quite overgrown, isn't it?
Yeah, this would have been a six-bed ward,
with doors through there to the nursing station,
and the bathrooms, etc.
And in here, there would have been six beds for the infected.
Was it just cholera on here, or was there ever anything else?
One chap was brought over here with bubonic plague.
He died and was cremated.
But the crematorium was a stone furnace,
enclosed in a wooden shed.
And when they cremated him,
actually, they set fire to the wooden shed,
so the crematorium also burned down at the same time as the cremation.
So it was a total cremation.
It's not that funny, is it?
But that certainly did for him, then,
if they actually burnt down the crematorium as well as the body.
Yes. Blimey.
It really was used quite a lot to protect the mainland, wasn't it?
You have those gun fortifications down here,
the cholera hospital here stopping the spread of disease.
Well, it was always the main defence against any form of invasion,
either by illness or by enemy.
So it's a main place of defence against anything which could
harm the people of the Channel ports.
The hospital became essential.
Nearly 900 ships a week were coming to Cardiff to load up with coal.
By the time the city opened a third dock in 1874,
it was even possible to walk across the docks by stepping from
deck to deck of the ships moored within them.
As money poured into the city of Cardiff
from the booming coal industry, the population exploded.
It was here in Grangetown
where many of the working class people were housed.
In fact, this area was known
for having some of the poorest of the poor.
There were more paupers living here than anywhere else
in the entire city and an 1873 the census put the average number
of people living in each cottage as 13.
It was very, very different, obviously, for the people
that were managing the money.
For themselves they built huge mansions,
one of which can still be seen today in Llandaff.
This place was built in 1856 by the Insole family.
They owned the Cymmer Colliery in the Rhondda Valley
and it made them extremely wealthy.
For nearly half a century,
these mine owners and coal shippers spent phenomenal sums of money
lavishly improving and redeveloping their mansion.
Most of it has been derelict for nearly three decades
and it's currently closed to the public,
but Gray Hill and Elaine Davey from the Insole Court Trust are going to
show me how Cardiff's Victorian elite used to live.
Well, welcome to Insole Court. Follow me. This is a beautiful room.
Oh, wow, look at this.
That is something else, isn't it?
That is amazing, look at that painting.
It looks so medieval, doesn't it?
Well, that's Gothic revival fashion at the time.
Goodness me, so the Insole family would have sat in this room
with a cigar and some brandy, was it? That's right, yes.
This was eventually used as the smoking room,
as the gentlemen's smoking room.
So only men allowed, was it? I would imagine so.
The evidence of all the smoking is in the lovely Penarth alabaster,
because this pink is quite stained now.
If you think of it compared to the...
Oh, no way, yeah. ..alabaster in the hall...
I see what you mean, Elaine. At the top here. Look at this.
Actually, you can see, can't you,
that it's much paler down the bottom here and then,
as the smoke's gone up, it's turned it that nicotine brown?
It's like being in one of those sort of old school pubs, isn't it,
where you can still see the ceilings are covered in tar and nicotine?
'The conditions down the Insoles' mines were tough and dangerous.
'It was extremely physical work
'with a real risk of flooding and explosions.
'Children as young as ten were labouring incredibly long hours
'for a pittance.
'Meanwhile, the huge fortunes made from their hard work
'allowed the family to live in absolute luxury.'
Wow!
My goodness me.
That ceiling, there's something almost spiritually moving
about something like that, isn't there?
You almost imagine it in the Vatican City.
It's quite church-like, isn't it?
"The wealth of the mind is the only true wealth",
and "the fount of wisdom flows through books." Oh, yes.
You can see what a reading place,
what a place for books this would have been.
I find it quite hard to buy into "the wealth of the mind is
"the only true wealth" whilst looking up at a ceiling
that presumably would have cost tens of thousands of pounds
in today's money to make. Absolutely.
'I'm imagining what this place would have looked like in its glory days,
'full of exquisite furniture and all the trappings of the high life.
'Every aspect of design seems to have been the very best,
'the most exclusive, the most expensive,
'right down to the tiniest detail.'
Rabbits, ducks.
'Including the wallpaper,
'which was created by designers to the super rich.'
Oh, my goodness me.
I was expecting you to open this door to a little room,
not another staircase. And another set of rooms.
Just goes on and on, doesn't it?
This is pretty amazing because this was the cold store. Oh.
But you've still got that wallpaper. Oh, yeah.
Even in the cold store.
Even in the cold store, they've got the exclusive wallpaper print.
That says it all, doesn't it?
I mean, talk about Gothic revivalism.
It doesn't get more Gothic than a staircase winding round
up into a castle turret, does it?
'The Insoles lived here for three generations and each dynasty
'put their own stamp on the house,
'bolting on extra features on top of this mishmash of a building.'
This is absolutely spectacular, isn't it?
What a spot they've picked for their place.
Well, they can watch their ships going out with all the coal,
bringing all the money to the family.
There's something about it, though, isn't there?
I mean, you imagine they're kind of up here,
drinking their brandy, smoking their cigars,
they can look out that way to watch the coal...
Looking over their estate. But do you think there's something
a little bit gross about it as well, you know,
given the kind of conditions in the mines during that period?
The great irony of Insole Court is that the same year it was built,
160 years ago, there was the largest industrial accident
in South Wales at the time.
114 men and boys lost their lives at the Insoles' colliery in Cymmer,
and although the Insoles themselves and the management of their mines
were acquitted of any wrongdoing, certainly there is some evidence
that as the mine owners they ignored health and safety warnings.
So presumably there was no compensation paid to anyone.
That's right, the miners' families were paid no compensation.
This is a fabulous, ornate piece of design and architecture
and opulence, but it was very much,
like all of South Wales' great houses,
built on the blood, sweat and tears of many thousands of people.
Despite the intriguing architecture and historical importance of
this mansion, until recently it was at risk from demolition.
It's only thanks to a hard-fought campaign
by some passionate supporters that it was saved.
Going around Insole Court today really has brought home to me,
you know, actually just how little we have left in Cardiff,
in the city itself, of that industrial coal era.
There were thousands of mansions just like this in this area
and this is one of the very few that's still standing today.
And it's something that's being forgotten and that's why
it's so, so important that the heritage of this place
continues to carry on, because without it,
all of that is gone.
Insole Court demonstrates the extent to which
the Victorian era brought money and development to Cardiff.
By the 1870s, the coal industry had expanded Cardiff's population
to nearly 60,000, and with that came the demands of modernisation.
Gas lighting first arrived in 1821, but towards the end of the century
it was being used to generate heating and electricity.
As the population increased,
that meant more and more gas had to be produced and then stored.
Locked away on wasteland in the Grangetown area is one of
the few remaining connections to that history.
It's in plain sight for all to see, but like me, I bet most people
have little idea what it was used for, let alone how old it is.
The current owners have agreed to unlock the gates
and let me take a closer look.
This is the gas holder built for gas storage on the old
Grangetown gasworks site. Right, OK.
When was it built? It was built in 1881.
It's an amazing-looking structure.
And, Ray, you can actually remember
when this was in use, can't you? Yes, indeed.
I remember once bringing down my grandfather's lunch
when he was working a long shift,
crawling through all of the hot areas, you know,
over pools of smoking tar... WILL LAUGHS
..dodging steam engines. It was very good.
Health and safety was top of the list.
Pretty lax in those days, by the sounds of things!
It's really quite impressive, once you've stood in the middle,
isn't it? Yeah, it is, it's like a big theatre, isn't it?
It feels a lot bigger from in here, actually,
than it does from outside, doesn't it? Exactly, yeah.
It's almost got that kind of stadium or coliseum feel to it, actually.
The Victorians loved being ornate in everything they did.
For something so functional,
this holder features 16 cast-iron Doric columns with cornices
in the manner of 15th-century Florentine architecture.
That's not just me saying that,
this structure has been officially listed.
There's something about a lot of these industrial sites
that I've been seeing, there's that Victorian flourish, almost.
Why did they go to such effort in what is actually just a gas holder?
Confidence and pride. The Victorians were very confident.
The gasworks on this site burned nearly 400 tonnes of coal a day
to produce gas that would be stored in one of six holders.
These containers consisted of vessels that sat inside
the outer metal framework and they would rise and fall on tracks
that run up and down the side of the walls.
As the gas was pumped into the holder, the vessel would rise.
When the gas was being used, the chamber would fall.
Living next door to these gasworks must have been pretty intense.
It was an inferno of activity, and the local residents
even complained to Parliament in London about the smell.
So when I sit back at home with my gas hob and I can smell that gas
before I spark it, would this place have really stank as well?
So the smell that you smell in gas today is because of an odorant
that we added to it in the network,
but in those days the gas had a particular town gas smell to it
because of the other constituents of the gas.
You'd have tarry smells, you'd have hydrogen sulphide smells,
that bad egg smell as well.
I heard that local women sometimes would bring their children
down here to actually smell the gas on the site because
they believed it had some sort of restorative property. Is that true?
It has been recorded that doctors would send their mothers down
with children if they had a whooping cough or any other kind of
breathing or chest ailment to come and breathe in some of the smells
from the waste products. No way.
And it sometimes used to make them sick and it actually seemed
to work quite well, but it's certainly not something
that GPs would advise doing these days.
WILL LAUGHS Not on the NHS.
By the end of the 19th century, Cardiff was networked for gas.
The city streets and buildings could be lit 24/7.
The result - literacy went up, crime rates went down.
Thanks to the Victorian ingenuity,
Cardiff was dragged from the Dark Ages into the modern era.
By the end of the 1800s,
20% of all the world's coal exports came from this city.
The place was thriving back then,
but a lot of the coal wealth was controlled by the Bute family.
There were attempts to break that monopoly.
I've come to meet railway historian John Buxton, and he's got the keys
to a hidden construction that can help tell that story.
It's private land, but he's called in some favours to gain us access.
So, here we are at the tunnel. Yeah.
And as you can see, it's quite a structure. It looks great. Yeah.
We have to go into the tunnel wearing safety helmets, though.
OK, I see, no worries. So here's yours. Fantastic.
Great, shall we go and have a look? Let's go have a look.
So this is the Wenvoe Tunnel, is it? Yes.
It's almost like an optical illusion, isn't it?
It just seems so long and dark and there's that tiny little spot
of light right at the back there.
Yes, just over a mile long, and it was built in 1888.
It was a testament to the engineering and the scale of
the coal industry in the late Victorian period.
Right, that's why I understand this is something that's
critically important to the Victorian coal industry in Cardiff.
Oh, yes, this line was a key artery from the coalfields
to the dock at Barry. Cool. Let's try and crack her open then.
Let's try and get it open, yes. It might be a bit stiff.
There we are. Great stuff. Not as bad as I thought.
In a classic tale of a self-made man, this tunnel was built by
the engineer and colliery owner David Davies.
Originally a farmer, he became Wales's first millionaire
during the late Victorian era.
Fed up with the Butes' stranglehold on the South Wales coal industry,
Davies was the driving force in getting the neighbouring town
of Barry its own railway and dock system,
therefore bypassing Cardiff altogether.
This tunnel was a key link in transporting the coal from
Davies' mines to Barry.
It took 3,000 men to build it and the fact he was willing to fund such
a huge engineering project shows how much profit there was to be made.
And Davies was right.
By 1901, Barry had overtaken Cardiff
as the world's leading coal exporter.
It looks like a lot of work has gone into constructing this tunnel, John.
Yes, it was a massive effort by hundreds of men.
Basically, it was built with manpower, horsepower and dynamite.
What would the conditions have been like down here? Very arduous.
It's a very wet tunnel, as you can see, quite cold,
quite dangerous, obviously,
with dynamite and horses and men moving rocks.
Quite a dangerous job.
And you can see here in the brickwork,
it's a really seriously impressive construction.
A lot of manpower, but also it's very well built, isn't it?
Yeah, it's very well engineered. The Barry Railway, who built this,
had a reputation for building very good structures
and this is no exception.
'The tunnel's only function today is to house a water mains pipe
'that's used to supply Barry.
'Water's a big feature down here anyway -
'the tunnel can flood up to four feet deep
'and water is constantly pouring through the brickwork.'
Goodness me. I reckon this should be all right to drink, shouldn't it?
It should be filtered.
I'll tell you what, John, that's really nice.
We could bottle that and go into business, mate.
This must be the ventilation shaft we're coming up to.
Yeah, just coming up to it now.
We're about halfway through the tunnel.
But that's a lovely pool of light, isn't it? It is, yes.
You can see the sky. Ah, here we go.
This is a really impressive-looking structure.
What do you reckon, 40 metres? At least, I would think, yeah.
That's incredible. That's a really, really cool hole.
Why did they need a ventilation shaft, though?
You need a ventilation shaft,
or it's ideal to have a ventilation shaft in tunnels
when you're operating steam locomotives because you need to
disperse the smoke and the steam from the tunnels as quickly
as possible, and this helps do that.
Right, so would people have been able to stand above ground
and literally see billows of steam?
Oh, yes, yeah. Wow. Certainly, yeah.
Just trying to get my bearings, actually. What's up there?
Well, we're right underneath Culverhouse Cross now,
the shopping centre. We never are. We are, yeah. You're joking.
Do you want to pop in and get something? WILL LAUGHS
You would think that you wouldn't be able to miss
a massive chasm like that,
but all of the times I've been to Culverhouse Cross and driven around
and just had absolutely no idea that this huge shaft
and then massive tunnel was hidden down here.
Yes, well, it is capped over and it's not easy to find.
Are there many other stories for this tunnel?
Well, interestingly, yes.
The royal family, when they visited South Wales in the royal train,
often were stabled in Wenvoe station.
But during the Second World War,
obviously there were air raids on and the Great Western Railway
management were very concerned about the safety of the royal family.
Sure. So instead of stabling it in the station,
they gradually brought it into the tunnel. You're kidding.
And the royal family stayed overnight
in the train in the tunnel.
I can't believe it.
So you mean to tell me that the royal family would have
sat in here in their train, eating their dinner,
maybe having a gin and tonic,
staring at these walls to avoid bombing?
It's the safest place to be in an air raid, a tunnel. That's amazing.
Not very royal, though, is it?
'The last time this tunnel saw a train was in 1963.
'It's been closed ever since a fire in a signal box,
'but this forgotten relic from the Victorian era
'is still one of the longest tunnels in South Wales.'
It strikes me as a bit of a pity, to be honest, John.
I mean, it's such an incredible structure and it's still in
such fantastic condition.
Do you think there's ever any chance of life after death
for a place like this?
Some tunnels like this have been refurbished and used as
cycleways and walkways, so there is a possibility that it could be
used for that in the future. That would be awesome, wouldn't it?
I'll tell you what, though, going to need to do
a bit of cleaning up in here first, aren't they?
You won't get very far on a bicycle through all of this mud, but...
No, there's an awful lot of work to do.
But the structure's here, so who knows what may happen in the future?
Back in the city centre, it's pretty difficult to find any clues
to Cardiff's past before the 19th century.
But I'm told they are there.
Peter Finch is a Cardiff born and bred historian.
I'm meeting him at the site of the old medieval castle that
the Marquess of Bute turned into a Victorian Gothic mansion.
Peter tells me that a stone's throw from here
is a glimpse into life that dates back nearly 2,000 years.
And you can see that we're going down slowly as Womanby Street
bends into Quay Street in front of us,
which itself goes down further to Westgate Street,
which is where the Taff flowed, amazingly.
OK, so literally here...
Literally here, where the cars are going now,
was the River Taff, and the clue is in the name Quay Street.
Why is it called Quay Street? Because there was a quay here.
Way before we had docks, way before we had a canal,
there was a town quay here in which wooden ships would tie up,
coming up the tidal Taff to tie up just here.
'A stone quay was built here around 800 years ago,
'replacing a trading post which had existed since Roman times.
'But in the 1840s, that quay became redundant.
'The celebrated engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel
'diverted the river so that he could complete the construction
'of the South Wales Railway.'
It must have been an enormous amount of work, to drain this and move it
and to stick the River Taff over there. I mean, why did they bother?
Rivers are dangerous things, particularly the Taff.
Just down there was where St Mary's Church stood
until the floods took its walls away,
washed away its graveyard and took the bones out to sea.
And what Brunel wanted to do was to build a railway station in
the middle of this bogland, and the only way he could do it,
he, as the great engineer he was, worked out, was to move the river.
Moving the river not only affected the geography of the city,
but it also enabled the railways to transport much more
coal down to the docks.
In just 20 years, Cardiff went from shifting 100,000 tonnes a year
via the canal to 2 million tonnes by train.
Come on, now, Peter, you know Cardiff inside out.
If there was one secret spot that you were going to take me to
that was going to absolutely blow my mind, where would it be?
For a burger. A burger?
'Every week, thousands of customers come through the
'doors of this fast food restaurant, but upstairs there is a locked door
'that's sealed away an extraordinary piece of Cardiff's past.
'It's now a Grade II listed room, but it's closed to the public for
'reasons of health and safety.
'We're very fortunate they're allowing TV cameras in here
'for the first - and what they say is the last - time.'
Goodness me. Where are you taking me now, Peter?
We'll go through the "staff only", and beyond here.
Oh, my goodness me.
We find ourselves in the Mahogany Room. Look at this place.
This is extraordinary.
I would never have believed that there was going to be
a place like this above a burger restaurant.
I've never seen anything like it.
Of course, it wasn't always a burger restaurant.
If we go back about 300 years or so, this was a pub... Was it now?
..called the Green Dragon.
You can see it reflected in the stained glass up there... Oh, yeah.
..where, you see, a lot of important people who used to come here,
the ship-owners, the councillors, the industrialists of Cardiff,
and important decisions were made in here over a drink
before they were really made in the city hall.
Beneath these flickering gas lamps,
surrounded by this lavish stained glass...
Extremely English, I think. The English flag is up there.
We can see there's a Dutch windmill above my head over here.
Where's that? Oh, up at the top there? Yeah. That's right.
And I can't see anything significantly Welsh about this. No.
But this was a long time ago,
and Cardiff didn't need to state its Welshness.
It was, I suppose...
It had just been made a city, and it didn't care - not then.
This has to be one of the most unbelievable rooms
I think I've ever been in.
I cannot get my head around the fact that
we're just above a burger restaurant.
When you look at these, sort of, intricacies with the animals
in the alabaster, and all of these incredible wood carvings,
and the stained glass, but then you, kind of, come to this window here,
you look outside, and I think about the amount of times...
I mean, hundreds of times I've walked down that street,
and never once would I have guessed that there was this place.
We don't do the past in Cardiff is what I've learnt.
There are a couple of little bits that hang on,
like the castle and St John's Church,
but virtually everything else gets wiped, as soon as possible.
"Let's get rid of it."
Nothing looks anything like that which it did,
and then you come in and you come upstairs in a place like this,
and, whoa, there it is - the past once again -
and this, magnificently, is one of them.
'Walking through the centre today,
'the modern shop fronts have hidden a lot of the history we have
'still got left, but you only have to look up to see the past.
'Peter's now taking me to Hodge House,
'to access the roof, where only the engineers go these days.
'It's a real monster that was built in 1915 by shop owners,
'the Co-operative Wholesale Society.
'It was an expression of Welsh wealth, opened at the height
'of Cardiff's coal industry.'
And it's styled loosely on the shops in Regent Street in London,
although maybe not quite convincingly.
'Six giant floors up, and there's still further to go to
'take us back into the past.'
Well... Great.
I'll tell you, this really is one of those buildings that,
when I'm walking down St Mary's Street,
I just walk straight past without even noticing,
but luckily I've got keys and permission to go up here. Terrific.
If you're up for it, Peter? Yeah, we'll have a go and give it a go.
Oh, yeah, let's have a look.
It's pretty steep.
Vertical, even.
After you.
I'll catch you. Don't worry.
'Its crowning glory is a four-faced clock tower,
'and it's easy to miss from street level.'
'The clock no longer works,
'and up in this tower it's like time has frozen.'
Wow. This place is awesome.
Check this out. This is full of surprises.
This is great, isn't it?
Quite... We're right behind the clock face, right?
Oh, look at! Do you know what? That's pretty smooth.
I reckon something's still moving here... Oh. METAL GRINDING
I think we'll call it a day, there, Peter, actually.
Should do. We should do.
Inexperienced men that we are... Inexperienced men.
That's awesome, isn't it?
Oh, a bit of a squeeze.
'This bell was cast in 1915,
'but, like the clock downstairs,
'it hasn't functioned in decades.'
How do you think Cardiff was viewed by the rest of the world back then?
Well, back then, at the height of the coal trade,
Cardiff was known throughout the world.
It was a very famous place that appeared in the plays
and the novels that Americans were writing.
Everybody had heard of Cardiff.
We've declined since then.
The First World War was good for Cardiff's trade.
The coal was exported to fund the war, to fuel the ships,
to fuel the trains,
but, after that, the period of the Depression in the '20s,
and Cardiff never recovered.
The world moved on from coal.
So, do you think, then, that it was, sort of,
the case that all of Cardiff's eggs were in one basket, and when
coal started to decline, they found themselves in a lot of trouble?
Yeah, Cardiff, the one-trick pony.
Well, two-trick pony, really,
if you count the steel that was exported from here.
The decline was steady until you got to the 1960s,
and by the 1960s we were exporting nothing.
The trade had ceased.
Although Cardiff became the capital of Wales in 1955,
it struggled to find its feet in the post-war climate,
but it did find a new, secret role as part of the UK's defence
against a terrifying global threat.
After World War II, the prospect of a nuclear war between the USSR
and the western Allies was very real.
Our Government became increasingly worried an atomic bomb could
be dropped on Britain from enemy aircraft.
'For the first time ever,
'we've been given access to film a building that was
'a small part of Cardiff's secret Cold War defence plan,
'hidden on a housing estate in the suburb of Llandaff.'
I'm hoping to find somebody here, though,
who's a bit of a Cold War expert.
Hopefully he knows where the door is. Ah, Jon.
Hi. How are you doing? Great to meet you. Good, thanks.
So what is this place, Jon? It looks like a prison.
Yeah, well, this is a sub control bunker, built in the early '50s,
in case of nuclear war.
Good grief. So shall we have a look around?
Yeah, do you think we're all right? Yeah, yeah, we...
We should put our head torches on. Yeah, I brought two.
Right, here we go, then, Jon.
I'm guessing these lights switches don't work any more.
No, there's no power in here.
Good grief, there's a lot of stuff on the floor as well. Yeah.
It's covered in glass, mate. Watch your step. All sorts in here.
Blimey, look at this! Yeah. So what was this place used for?
Well, this was a communications sub control bunker.
If there was a nuclear war,
it would have become one of the centres of Government.
And I'm guessing these places, in terms of the general public,
this really was a secret, isn't it?
It's like something out of science fiction, really.
The Government didn't think it was necessary to tell people about these
locations because, in the end, it was just about running the country.
Right. So they didn't really care about protecting the public.
So people like you and I, Jon, we would have been toast,
let's be honest. I think so. Yeah.
So how long would they have run a place like this for?
Life would have got very difficult here within days and weeks.
Yeah, it sounds about right. So, yeah...
I mean, I haven't seen a toilet yet, Jon. Yeah.
And, you know, the, sort of, psychological side of it as well
would have been tough for everyone.
Wow. Do you reckon it still works? I'm going to pull the chain.
'But there are toilets, a kitchen and bunk beds.
'For the civil defence personnel lucky enough to be sent here
'in a nuclear attack, the plan was to stay as long as possible.'
'The bunker was designed to be self-sufficient, presumably
'while the rest of the city melted from radiation poisoning.
'It was even equipped with its own generator.'
Can you imagine being stuck in this room next to a diesel generator?
Yeah, it'd be pretty smelly, and pretty loud as well.
Oh, look at this. What's this here, now?
That's a radiation dosimeter by the look of it.
In the event of some sort of nuclear attack,
this would be used to test levels of radiation after a nuclear blast.
Right. So I think this is really unusual, actually,
to find in a bunker.
It's brand-new. Still looks pretty new.
That's absolutely spotless. Yeah.
And lots of bunkers...
'There was also a games room - a welcome distraction perhaps
'to while away the hours of the unfolding nuclear apocalypse.'
Look, there's a record player here, look. Oh, yeah.
So some reminders of the outside world here.
Yeah, look, what have we got here?
"American Recordings - You'll Never Be 16 Again".
Well, there's a cruel irony in that in the case of
a nuclear holocaust, isn't there? WILL LAUGHS
Roy Orbison... I think that's been deliberately put there, hasn't it?
Yeah. Goodness me.
# Oh, no You'll never be 16 again... #
Looks like it. I think this probably was a control room.
It looks like someone's thrown some darts through
the war room map up here. Yeah.
Yeah, actually you can see bits of the map here, look.
Just little bit. Oh, yes!
So this would have been, I think, across the whole wall, actually.
You can just see remnants here.
'In 1953, officials estimated that in the event of
'a nuclear bomb dropped on Wales, over 1.3 million people would die.
'That's some terrifying figures.'
You can imagine if someone levelled a bomb at the city centre,
this is almost the area that would be fried. Yeah.
That is a really quite scary, scary thing to consider, isn't it?
'And the more enemy bombers carrying nuclear warheads,
'the more chance of one of them slipping through your defences.
'Spy photographs showed the USSR had quite a few.'
MUSIC: White Cyclosa by Boards Of Canada
'Where we are going next is a stark reminder of the lengths to
'which Britain went to counteract that threat.
'Hidden here in a forest is another bunker from the 1950s,
'that shows Cardiff had its own important role in defending
'Britain from nuclear attack.'
CROWS CAW This is the top of a mountain.
We're on a ridge. We're in a forest.
There's crows croaking in the background, and then there's this
very, very bleak-looking concrete block,
almost, sort of, dropped out of the sky in the middle of
this clearing here.
It all feels...
It feels a bit grim, actually. I'll be completely honest.
This is not a nice feeling up here.
So, in truth, it turned out to be a lot more difficult
to get into this bunker than I anticipated, so...
I've put a call in to our safety guy,
and he's turned up with some ropes and some harnesses.
'I'm feeling really anxious about this.
'The only way in now is extremely sketchy,
'and I've got no clue what's down there in the pitch black.'
Could you pass me that camera, John? I'm holding on by my fingertips.
Cool.
If there IS a bottom. Just switch to night vision here.
Just flick the infrared on.
There we go.
Wow!
This is something else.
Goodness me.
It is dark, it is tight.
Good grief!
OK...
All right, I'm down.
Tell me when the rope's free.
OK, good to go.
Just sort this camera out.
Wow. OK, so I'm down at the bottom of the shaft.
OK, that's better.
We've got...
some big old switchboard or something in front of me,
looks like there's some batteries.
Just going to try and check the floor down here.
Bit of debris, but it looks more or less safe.
CLATTERING
This isn't very nice now.
Coming in around this old door.
Let's hope there's nothing round there.
Might just use the camera to check. It is...
..pitch, pitch black down here.
CLATTERING
I've walked across jungles on my own in Western Africa...
HE SIGHS
I've stayed with isolated tribes in New Guinea...
but walking around this place just outside of Cardiff
up on the hill, in the dark...
This is definitely about as scary as it gets for me.
Whooo...
HE SIGHS
'That's about as much as I can take here on my own,
'and thankfully, I can hear the rest of the crew making their way down.'
If you can get your foot...
Get your foot on there - that's it, I've got you.
It's pretty tight, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.
All right, mate? Pretty good. Welcome to the pit.
Shall we switch on to the good camera now? OK.
'With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950,
'the threat of a nuclear war seemed more serious than ever.
'John tells me this huge bunker was one of about 30 secret bases
'located all over the UK,
'equipped with high-tech radar and communications equipment.'
That's stairs there! Stairs, yeah, up to the next level.
I didn't even see any of this stuff.
And it looks as if this is the control room, in here.
Look at this place!
Essentially, this place would have been able to coordinate
large gun emplacements on the coast
to actually fire at incoming enemy aircraft carrying atomic weapons,
so this was the first, kind of, form of atomic defence,
this idea that you would have to shoot them out of the sky.
'This was called an anti-aircraft operations room,
'and it was situated miles from the guns it remotely operated.
'That way, if the guns were hit by the enemy,
'the military personnel were safely hidden here,
'deep inside the bunker.'
These would have been offices of the higher-ups, the military personnel,
looking down on the control room, making decisions.
Exactly, looking down at the maps.
Making sure nobody's sleeping on the job. Yeah.
'Dozens of military personnel worked here in secret.
'In the event of a nuclear war, an air purification system
'and water filters meant the bunker could be sealed from radiation,
'allowing the staff to remain down here for months.'
I mean, it looked pretty big from the outside,
but the inside just goes on and on and on.
You see, a lot of people often think about the Second World War
and the Cold War as kind of separate things,
but this sort of place shows you that, you know,
after the end of the Second World War,
Britain was thinking about the world, how it was...
Thinking about military threats,
and this is a really good example of something like that.
It's very much carrying on the kind of World War II thinking
about defence.
What was the point, then, that things started to wind down here
in terms of, you know, the monitoring of the nuclear weapons
that could potentially be brought over by aircraft?
In the 1950s, once the missile technology did get better, these...
The original purpose of this particular structure
became redundant.
And also, new radar technology came in, as well,
so there was no longer any particular reason
to have these types of structures.
I don't think a lot of these Cold War structures
are kind of well-known.
They're not accessible, and in a sense,
the Cold War seems to be almost a shut book,
so people don't really talk about the Cold War any more.
Is funny, isn't it?
You know, if this was a World War I or a World War II site,
there'd be a tour guide out the front,
probably someone selling ice creams and T-shirts, but... Yeah.
..the Cold War, it just didn't quite capture...
Well, it's because it was passive defence, in a sense, isn't it?
So these buildings were never used to help the country recover
after a nuclear war.
In a way, it's a hidden history for that reason, as well.
Dozens of these buildings were created,
but then they were never used for their intended purpose.
BIRDSONG
In the 1960s, bunkers like this one
were redesigned as regional war rooms.
Their purpose was to secretly house government officials
who could run the country after a nuclear attack.
Amazingly, this one remained in operation
right up until the early 1990s.
And it was in the early 90s that Cardiff entered
a period of considerable regeneration.
With a huge amount of European funding and private investment,
the city centre, the docks and the Bay were reshaped and rebuilt.
Cardiff became the centre
for Wales's devolved national government.
Billions of pounds of development money
will soon change the Welsh capital once again,
and from the top of the city's biggest building site,
it feels like it's already happening.
I think what I've learned is actually just how new Cardiff is.
Sure, people have lived here for thousands of years,
but the city itself is relatively new,
and its default setting is to delete the past and move on.
On the one hand, that seems fine.
Evolution is really important to any modern-day city,
but there is always a price to pay.
Cardiff was built on the backs of industry and hard graft,
but it's new modern-day character revolves around retail,
finance and communications,
and I worry that with such a new, brave start,
we might just forget where we once came from.
# Cardiff in the sun
# Sha la la la la la la la
La la la la la la
# Cardiff in the sun
# Sha la la la la la la la
La la la la la la... #