Non Fiction
Category: Art and Photography, Non Fiction, Places
Number of pages: 213
ISBN: 9781781725580
Publication date: October 22, 2019
Price: £14.99
Join Peter Finch and John Briggs on twenty walks around Cardiff, the bustling capital of Wales. Together they visit the new and the ancient, the difficult, the undiscovered, the lesser-known, the artistic, the entertaining, the quirky and the unexpected. They criss-cross the city, informing, discovering, exploring, and enduring, reviving old routes as they go, from its farthest reaches – Lisvane, Penarth Pier, Llanrumney – to its familiar centre around Cathays Park and the castle. Their journeys encompass the city’s history, and record daily life on its streets, in its parks and its famous and not so famous, buildings.
Poet and psychogeographer Peter Finch has conducted numerous alternative rambles, literary walk, non-literary adventures and cycle-aided excursions across Cardiff, which he knows intimately.
His discursive descriptions can be used as both route finder and literary adventure. Armchair walkers will find the book as interesting and useful as those who get out there on the streets. And natives and visitors alike will find a new discovery around every corner.
The routes include:
- Cardiff Bay to Waun Gron Park
- A Cardiff Counter Culture Poetry Ramble
- The Heart of Ely
- A Central Cardiff Spiral
- The Republic of Roath
- Copper’s Fields to the New Ninian Park
- Grand Avenue’s End to Caerau Hillfort
- Lisvane to Health Halt
- Llandaf to the lost Great Sone on St Mary Street
- The Llanishen and Danescourt Greenbelt
- Llanishen to Cathays
- Morganstown Tumulus to Castell Morgraig
- Pengam Green to Penarth Pier
- Roath Park Lake to Pac Coed Y Nant
- Rumney Castle to Castleton
- The Lambies
- Rhymney Bridge to St Mellons
- St Fagans to Danescourt
- Following the Roath Branch Mineral Railway
- The Whitchurch Writers’ Trail
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.
John Briggs
John Briggs was born in 1947 in St Paul, Minnesota. He came to Wales in the 1960s to study at Atlantic College in the Vale of Glamorgan, where an increasing passion for photography resulted in his first street images of Cardiff. He gained a degree in French at the University of Minnesota, also working as a part-time reporter. In 1947, returning to Wales to do teacher training at University College, Cardiff, he began systematically photographing the city’s disappearing docklands.
Briggs’s books include Before the Deluge, Taken in Time and Newportrait. He has also published Walking Cardiff and Walking the Valleys in collaboration with Peter Finch.
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