Exploring Atlantic Wharf

I spent a good part of Friday in the office, the Owain arrived early evening and we went out for a drink and brought home a very nice pizza for supper from 'La Cabrisella', a small Italian run place down on Cowbridge Road, and drank rather a lot of wine together while we talked. He stayed the night and then spent the day looking up friends and watching the rugby in a cup with friends.

The weather was good, so in the afternoon I made the effort to go into town, undecided about whether to catch a bus somewhere or walk to Penarth, but decided go and photograph some of the new buildings across the London-Paddington railway line, where the new Central Cardiff Enterprise Zone developing in the vicinity of the stylish if daftly named 'Smart Bridge' pedestrian railway crossing. 

Historically, this was an area of dockland industries and poor housing called 'Newtown', being one of the first areas of the city to expand with Irish migrant labourers in the early nineteenth century. There's no trace of its early history, as it was a poor area, and it has been built over several times since then. Only the name on map serves as a reminder of its story.  

Then, my eye drew me past newish Tyndall Street hotels, down Schooner Way, with the Novotel on the corner, interestingly combining old warehouse with new-build glass and steel.

There's now the huge Waterside residential area in the old dockyard terrain between Atlantic Wharf and Lloyd George Avenue, with new-build houses, attractively interlinked with canals flanked by footpaths. The ancient Glamorganshire canal, which still runs concealed across the city centre, still supplies water to this network. Many if not all of the waterways would originally transported goods off-loaded from ships in Atlantic wharf to warehouse storage nearby. All are lined in brick and stone and bridged strategically for use of residents. 

How much of the old has been restored and how much is new-build imitation is hard to tell. 

After twenty years trees and gardens have matured and the new domestic environment has established itself. It's very quiet, well quiet I suppose, because most people would be indoors despite the congenial weather watching Wales nearly catch up and beat England in their six nation rugby match. Nearly, but not quite. In the middle of the actual Atlantic Wharf waterfront, quite close to a Holiday Inn Express hotel is a large pub called 'The Wharf'.

It is an extensive adaptation of the shells of two fine nineteenth century industrial buildings, with bars, a restaurant, and function suites in one half and offices, sadly empty, in the other. Built by Cardiff's native brewery S A Brain, it's just been sold, as it has failed to make a hoped for profit, being less of a social hub for its upwardly and outwardly mobile local residents than was expected.

Other fine old brick built warehouse buildings in this area have been turned into apartments.

There are many empty offices too, and I wonder how the current expansion in the old 'Newtown' area, not to mention the Central Square development hopes to draw in new business. Such faith in progress, so easily shaken by downturns in the global economy. What's needed so much more than empty office space is affordable housing, for rent or for sale. The revenue may be smaller for any who invest, but in the long terms it is sustainable. Time and time again, get rick quick schemes provide sustainable for the few, at the expense of the many. When will be ever learn?

The final pair of episodes of 'Trapped' were on tonight. Compelling watching. All was resolved intelligibly, our small town detective hero was vindicated, but sadly walked away a lonely man at the end, with his dignity and self respect intact. We were spared the media mobbing and acclaim of the successful sluth. Great acting, so much done with looks and subtle facial expressions, caught by beautiful camera work, as much on the landscape as the actors. Will there be a sequel, I wonder?

  

Windows 10 comes to CBS

Today has been spent in the CBS office again, working on a job description to drive recruitment for the appointment of a Business Crime Reduction Manager for the city centre. The job will take on many of the Partnership functions we've been carrying and developing over the past six years. It's been quite a revelation to review all the minor activities generated by our work, making up the total picture, like camera pixels

First thing, my office PC, being the newest, fastest and most capable of taking advantage of the faster office broadband link, announced it was ready for the Windows 10 upgrade. True to the Microsoft promise, the upgrade took an hour, and left every program I installed working properly. Just as well, as I needed to be able to put it to use immediately. It'll take a few days to read the reviews and try out all the new features, however.

Ashley and I had a first meeting this morning with the new Brains area manager, who has been invited to be a BCRP Board member. Another element of much needed progress in developing the public face of the organisation is now in place. On the the way back to the office, we bought a new Acer 23" desktop PC for Ashley in John Lewis', to replace his six year old Vista laptop. In the business realm, the value of equipment like this decreases to virtually nothing, even though it works adequately. Everything else works well enough with new cloud based services, but older kit can struggle a bit for lack of processing power, or a not fast enough network hardware on board

I say 'works well enough', as Windows 10 re-synchronises the whole of our OneDrive file system as if it had never happened before, and it proved annoyingly slow. Working files saved, so others could access them, took an hour or so to show up and be accessible from another machine's file menu. Curiously however, OneDrive accessed from a browser found the files immediately. With millions of computers re-syncing with their Cloud drives on any given day after upgrading, it seems to me we can expect a period when file access from the desktop filesystem is less than efficient.

Still, that's number one machine updated. I wonder how long I will have to wait before Windows 10 is ready to install on any of my home machines?