Cathays - Buildings and Structures in Cathays

Buildings and Structures in Cathays

From 1840, the Taff Vale Railway company developed a railway line through Cathays, where they also developed the Cathays railway works. A major carriage and wagon construction and maintenance facility, it and the associated locomotive depot were taken over and maintained by the Great Western Railway. Post nationalisation in 1946, British Railways sold the business and leased the site to the Pullman Company Ltd, where they maintained their carriages until the 1970s. The depot was closed from the late 1960s, redeveloped for buildings now used by the University of Cardiff. The carriage and wagon works was redeveloped in the early 2000s, and now houses a Lidl store and student accommodation block.

In 1875 Nazareth House was opened, to provide accommodation for orphans and elderly people. A popular local charity, one of many benefactors was the boxer Jim Driscoll, who after burial in Cathays cemetery in 1925 has had his grave tended to this day by the nuns of Nazareth House.

In 1898, John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute sold a large piece of land to Cardiff Council for the building of a new City Hall, imposing strict conditions regarding what purpose and where development could take place. As a result the city hall was built as far south in the purchased block of land as was possible, and the residual area to its north used for civic, cultural and educational purposes only. City Hall was completed in 1905 at a cost of £129,000, in time for Cardiff to be gain city status.

The land purchased by the council to the north of the city hall has since become one of the finest civic centres in the world, and now houses:

• Cardiff University, which moved from Newport Road to Cathays Park in 1909
• National Museum of Wales, opened in 1927
• Welsh National War Memorial, unveiled in 1928
• Welsh Office, the largest building in Cathays Park, which took over the Board of Health building in 1964. Now the administration centre of the Welsh Assembly Government

Maindy Pool was a clay pit that had gradually filled with water. After the death by drowning of 10 children and adults, it was filled in by using it as a rubbish tip. In 1948 the building of Maindy Stadium began on the same site, completed in 1951, which held cycling races in the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games. When the stadium was closed and replaced with a leisure centre, part of the site became a swimming pool.

Cathays Library is a Carnegie library built in 1906 and refurbished in 2009-10.