The Lights are Going Out all over Cardiff… | Pete takes Pictures
Something of a melodramatic title, but these are melodramatic times. In the age of austerity, when local council budgets have been slashed and slashed again, funding for the arts has practically dried up. Like murder victims in some sort of Agatha Christie drama, centres for the local arts have recently been knocked off one by one by some shadowy executioner. We lost the wonderful city centre exhibition space of Abacus a few weeks ago. Very shortly the historic Cardiff University Settlement building in Splott, a beating heart for the district’s community, will cease to exist as it is knocked down to make way for flats. Most of the libraries in the city have been converted into ‚Hubs‘, with the amount of stock available drastically slashed. The main concert venue in Cardiff, St. David’s Hall, sees its future in doubt as cuts begin to find their way deep to the marrow. But hey, so long as the city can brag about Tom Jones and rugby and Charlotte Church (though she does actually have a charged kind of awesome herself – see new footnote*) and make believe that there’s some sort of Cool Cymru thing going on in a capital that’s becoming increasingly void of culture, I guess everything’s cool – right?….
Source: petetakespictures.com