Cardiff runs Welsh TV empires from a mid-sized capital
Cardiff, Wales’s capital and largest city, counted about 383,919 residents in 2024 as the City and County of Cardiff—eleventh among UK cities. It anchors Welsh national institutions and a screen industry that revived Doctor Who in 2005 and spun Torchwood and Sherlock.
William Camden once floated a Caer-Didi etymology tying the name to a fort of Didius, one among several origin theories.
Settlement around Cardiff goes back to at least 6000 BC, some 1,500 years before Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid was finished, with monuments such as the St Lythans burial chamber near Wenvoe. The Silures held the land until the Romans built an eight-acre fort near the mouth of the Taff in AD 75. In 1081 William I, on an armed pilgrimage through South Wales, ordered a castle keep raised inside the old Roman walls, and Cardiff Castle has anchored the town ever since.
As the 1200s closed, no other town in Wales had passed 2,000 inhabitants. Owain Glyndŵr burned it and seized the castle in 1404, but it was rebuilt on the same street plan. It became the county town of the new Glamorganshire in 1536, a borough in 1542 and a head port for customs in 1573, and a flood, perhaps a tidal wave, on 30 January 1607 shifted the Taff and wrecked St Mary's Church. The Battle of St Fagans, fought just west of town during the Second English Civil War, was the last major battle in Wales.
The 2nd Marquess of Bute, born in 1793, spent his life building the docks and was hailed as the creator of modern Cardiff. From the 1830s his dock, linked to the Taff Vale Railway, made the town the main outlet for coal from the Cynon, Rhondda and Rhymney valleys, and its population grew by nearly 80 per cent a decade between 1840 and 1870. The 2021 census counted 362,400 people in the authority area, and Cardiff Bay now holds the Senedd and the Wales Millennium Centre.
Source: Cardiff
