Pierhead

I went down to the bay today, there is so much down there so decided this building would be todays blip as it stands out from the rest !

The story of the Pierhead
At the end of the 19th century, Etruria Marl clay was discovered in north east Wales in the town of Ruabon, near Wrexham. A popular building material during the 19th and 20th centuries, Ruabon terracotta was used to construct the iconic Pierhead building in Cardiff Docks or Tiger Bay, as it was often referred to.

Inside the Pierhead there are two forms of terracotta, the red brick and the glazed terracotta (“majolica”). The company that supplied the Pierhead’s terracotta was J C Edwards and Co of Acrefair, Ruabon – once described as one of the most successful producers of terracotta in the world. More than 2000 people in the Wrexham area were involved in the trade, and Ruabon was known as “Terracottapolis”.

By the time the Pierhead was completed in 1897, Cardiff Bay was dominated by tall-ships as Cardiff became the world’s largest port, and the hub of the lucrative international trade in steam coal. As they entered the port, sailors would have seen the Pierhead and its clocktower - the Welsh Big Ben, its mechanism almost identical to its larger cousin in London - and known they were almost home. For others, this would be their first glimpse of south Wales, a place many of them would come to call home. As a result, Cardiff became the first multicultural community in the UK.

The link between Cardiff Docks and the south Wales valleys is epitomised by Sir William Thomas Lewis (1837-1914), who became Lord Merthyr of Senghennydd in 1911. Sir William was the General Manager of the Docks and in charge of all the traffic in and out of the port, and the considerable expansions and improvements made to the docks at this time. Merthyr-born Lewis was a mining and civil engineer by training, and a mine-owner.

Lewis played a leading role in the management of labour relations in Cardiff docks. He had a reputation for hard-dealing. Following the miners’ lockout of 1898, he was described as ‘the most hated man in Wales’.

In 1922, the Great Western Railway (GWR) took over Cardiff Railway Company and the Pierhead became a key office in its operations in south Wales. The coal trade had been in decline since 1913; by the 1930s, GWR was the biggest single user of Welsh coal.