ABSTRACT
The county borough of Cardiff (in Welsh, Caerdydtl) in the inter-war years was a major regional centre and the commercial capital of south Wales: With a population of over 223,000 in 1931, Cardiff was the most important urban centre in Wales and the seventeenth largest of the county boroughs. In the nineteenth century, Cardiff's location on the river Taff and its tributaries meant that it became the focal point for the development of both the iron working and coal mining of Glamorgan? Its economic fortunes lay in the export of the coal and iron ore together with the output of the highly developed heavy industry of its valley hinterlands. In the first half of the nineteenth century the borough's growth rested on the port trade in iron ore. However, by the mid nineteenth century Cardiff was of prime importance to the British economy and to the expanding global trade in coal. Cardiff's Victorian prosperity was based on the mining and exploitation of the fine quality steam coal of the Rhondda valley from the I 860s. The other valleys of South Wales. were then developed and linked to the port of Cardiff by a highly developed railway system that ran into the dockside. Transport was 'the raison d' etre of the town - the transfer of coal from the railway wagons to ships'.' To the wider world the coal of the South Wales valleys was known as 'Cardiff Coal'. Cardiff's industries, and those in its hinterland, also provided a large proportion of the iron rails of the developing railway networks of the world. By the 1880s the port of Cardiff ranked with Liverpool and London in terms of tonnage cleared and dominated the coal export trade of both the British Empire and the world.4 Cardiff's economic strength lasted up to the First World War and then went into decline.
