Non Fiction
ISBN: 9781781724699
Publication date: May 1, 2018
Price: £9.99
‘The Real Cardiff books have always been the locals’ best guide to the city’– Cardiff Life
‘Utterly compelling ambles around the Welsh capital, full of oddball nuggets and with a terrific sense of context and place.’ – The Rough Guide to Wales
Discover more of Cardiff in this latest volume by Peter Finch, Real Cardiff – The Flourishing City. In it the Cardiffian continues his vigorous exploration of the obvious and hidden vistas of the city, discovering new treasures and revisiting past haunts to find them drastically altered over just ten years. The pace of change has never been quicker, surpassing the booms of the city’s nineteenth century heyday, and the clearances and redevelopment of the 1960s and 1970s.
Real Cardiff: The Flourishing City is a characteristically eclectic mix. Finch walks through the city and through his memories, locating the odd and the outlandish and measuring them against the everyday. Here are the last days of Dic Penderyn, a litany of rock and roll on Queen Street, the battle for the Vulcan pub, the lost mansions of the east, the culinary odyssey of City Road, Roald Dahl in Radyr, the Lido at Llandaff, the Coast Path, and a journey round the city’s mosques, among many another strolls and diversions.
Jan Morris called Real Cardiff “one of the very best books about a city I have ever read”, and in this latest book Peter Finch has captured the essence of Cardiff again. This is vintage Finch, rolling with the city in the way that makes him its most acute – and funniest – commentator.
Peter Finch
Peter Finch is a poet, writer, performer, walker and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff. He has been a publisher, organisation manager, periodical editor, event organiser, literary agent and literary promoter. He was at the forefront of the UK’s small press revolution in the 60s and the 70s with his magazine Second Aeon and pioneered performance poetry in Wales during the 1980s. From 1974 to 1995 he ran the Oriel Bookshop in Cardiff. From 1996 to 2011 he was Chief Executive of Yr Academi Gymreig / The Welsh Academy, an organisation which was later rebranded as Literature Wales.
He specialises in books about the Welsh capital including the successful Real Cardiff series (4 volumes, most recently Real Cardiff: The Flourishing City), Edging The Estuary and its companion Edging The City, and The Roots Of Rock From Cardiff To Mississippi And Back. He has also written books in collaboration with photographer John Briggs: Walking The Valleys and Walking Cardiff.
If Finch is anything from all the above he is also a poet. His numerous poetry titles include Zen Cymru, Useful, Poems for Ghosts, Food and Selected Later Poems and The Machineries of Joy from Seren, Antibodies from Stride, and Vizet, a selected poems in Hungarian from Kronkét Könyvek. Important work from across the last fifty years were brought together in his two volume Collected Poems which was published by Seren in 2022.
