History
Cardiff was granted city status by King Edward VII in 1905.
In the 1960s, planners described Cardiff city centre as "worn out, inconvenient, drab and dangerous". The centre had escaped the extensive wartime bomb damage inflicted on other cities, so little redevelopment took place in the 1950s and 1960s. The Buchanan Plan of 1964 envisaged a highly-ambitious extended city centre, crossed with urban motorways. The council scrapped the proposed motorway network and focused on the small commercial core of the city; its proposed redevelopment scheme, in partnership with a private developer, would have seen almost all of the city centre (except St Mary Street and Working Street) demolished, replaced by modernist office towers of up to 21 storeys and pedestrianised decks linking multi-storey car parks to covered shopping malls.
By the time the legal agreement to implement 'Centreplan 70' was signed, the 1973 property crash had made it unviable. However, one legacy of the scheme was the future segregation of office and retail development, with the west end of Newport Road as the principal office area with secondary concentrations on Churchill Way, Greyfriars Road and Westgate Street.
Development in the 1970s and 80s was more piecemeal than envisaged in Centreplan, with the building of the St. David's Centre and St David's Hall, new multi-storey car parks, and the grant-supported construction of 14-storey Holiday Inn (now the Marriott) and World Trade Centre (now the Cardiff International Arena), which gave a fillip to the city's conference and exhibition business. In the mid-1980s developers returned to Queen Street, creating three medium-sized malls, helping it to become one of the best performing shopping streets in the country in terms of footfall and rental levels.
In the 1990s the Mill Lane cafe quarter was developed in partnership with the Welsh Development Agency, a pedestrian forecourt was created for the refurbished Central railway station, a new walkway was constructed alongside the Taff and the Millennium Stadium was built on the site of the National Ground and Empire Pool. The latter became, according to official publicists, one of the icons of Cardiff's new image.
Read more about this topic: Cardiff City Centre
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