YOUR WALK, YOUR PACE
Cardiff: Castle and Arcades
9 stops · 8 min of narration · 2.1 km
Available narration language: English
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STOP 1 / 9
Cardiff Central railway station
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We start here, outside Cardiff Central, on Central Square. Turn towards the station's stone frontage. Before we follow the river, there's a reason the railway and the water sit where they do.
Transport for Wales dates the station's opening to eighteen fifty. The frontage we see is later: the Great Western Railway rebuilt the station in the nineteen thirties. Those are two separate dates. Opening a railway station doesn't mean every stone outside it has been here since the first train.
And the river? Transport for Wales credits Brunel with diverting the Taff westwards in eighteen forty nine, creating a drier site for the railway. That's a bigger piece of station planning than adding another platform. We'll cross that river in a moment, to see the stadium from the opposite bank.
Narration uses a synthetic voice. Places, routes and stories are researched, with sources and photo credits available in each tour.