A little while back, friend of the blog Neil Cocker was looking at a new place to live in Cardiff, so asked for people to tell him about their local areas. He created a Cardiff Happiness Map from it!
We always have people on this blog, telling us all about Cardiff as a whole, but mostly about the individual parts of the city where they live. What makes them great, that sort of thing, but getting into the real detail of the thing is quite an ambiguous undertaking. So we’ve created the We Are Cardiff Neighbourhood Survey 2014!
Please take a few minutes to fill in the form below (if you’d like a direct link to the survey, click here: We Are Cardiff Neighbourhood Survey 2014), and please send it to ALL YOUR FRIENDS / CO-WORKERS / FAMILY here in Cardiff. We want as many responses from as many parts of the city as possible!
All responses are completely anonymised – there’s an option to leave an email address at the end if you want to be updated when we do something with the survey results, but you don’t have to do that. This info is purely for use here on the blog – for us to determine which really is the best neighbourhood in Cardiff, and why!
Annnnd….. go!
For info, this is what Neil Cocker’s Cardiff Happiness Map looked like a couple of months back. If you want to add in your own location and how much you like it, you can do that on his website here: Neil Cocker Happiness Map
For this personal geography, we get all up in Elliot Bennett’s grill – he’s the drummer for (mostly) Cardiff-based jazz band, Slowly Rolling Camera. Read on for Elliot’s slant on the city (he’s second from left in the picture).
Tell us about your Cardiff connections …
Although Dave (Stapleton – pianist/composer) now lives in Newbury, we were all students that studied at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. It was here that we started composing and playing together. Similarly, whilst still being a student, I was also the house drummer at the old Toucan Club, and Dionne (Bennett – vocalist/lyricist) was the vocalist in the funk and Latin band that played there on the weekend.
Tell us how Slowly Rolling Camera formed.
The band started out with Dave and myself discussing the need to write some new music that differed from our quintet. The want for a fresher approach that could have a wider a reach and echoed more of the things they were listening to, such as the Cinematic Orchestra, Robert Glasper, Christian Scott, Massive Attack and Portishead.
The writing process began with Dave sending me some ideas to see what I thought. Hooked on what I’d heard, I began playing around with the ideas presented and recorded some grooves and rhythms that would cement and support the phrases and melodies. This process continued for sometime, until we both realised that an ingredient was missing, the voice. There was only one person I had in mind that had the depth, warmth and soulfulness needed for what had been written. It was then, that I pitched the ideas to Dionne Bennett, a lyricist and vocalist that I had worked with many years ago.
Once Dionne had added some ideas, again me and Dave thought that a more electronic, produced sound pallet was needed to bind the existing ideas together, which is when I called upon my old university friend Deri Roberts to help. Like Dave and Dionne, I had worked with Deri many times in a number of different ensembles, some of which included the others. Fast forward to the present day, the four us through our friendship and work in various ensembles have written – I believe – music that has a little of all our personalities and life’s journey embedded with the fabric of the album.
Where was your first gig?
Our first gig was at Chapter Arts Centre, which I guess is regarded as a bit of a hub for music, drama and the arts in Cardiff and therefore, seemed the perfect location to showcase what we had written. Thankfully, the gig sold out and the response and feeling from the audience and players booked for the gig was great. The four of us now knew that the product worked, both as something to listen to at home, or as a live performance.
What are the great things about living in Cardiff?
Cardiff is a very friendly, lively and cosmopolitan city. It has great entertainment, a diverse music scene, good night life, and shopping all within walking distance.
Penylan Pantry – one of Elliot’s choice spots in Cardiff
How does it feel to be releasing an album?
I’m sure I speak for the others when I say that we are very proud to release this album. We wanted to collectively create something that appealed to a wide audience, that didn’t fit into a neat label or box that say’s ‘genre’ on it. Something that musicians would appreciate, music that would stand up for its production, engineering, the way it was recorded and mixed. It’s an album that contains snapshots of our life as friends and musicians, which like our name have slowly, rolled and evolved.
If you had friends coming to visit Cardiff for the weekend, what would you recommend they do?
During the day, stop for a coffee and a bite to eat at the Pen-y-lan Pantry or maybe visit Cardiff’s award-winning farmers’ markets on Sunday 10 – 2pm. And team that up with watching a knock-out performance from an amazing new band called ‘Slowly Rolling Camera’!
We Are Cardiff are looking for an editorial blog intern. You’ll be more like an actual writing, producing, photographing, blogging assistant than an intern – all your experience will be hands on and more than likely be published on our rather wonderful website!
What is We Are Cardiff? It’s a city blog that focuses on telling the stories of residents, including some information about local cultural events and happenings. We get about 6,000 visitors a month, who visit roughly 11,000 pages on our site. So as you can see, there’s the chance to get your work out to a pretty big audience.
You are: probably a student though we’ll consider anyone regardless of occupation. You’re based in Cardiff and interested in local events and culture. You’ve got opinions and ideas about what makes a good online presence. You’re handy with a camera and you’re fairly competent at writing. It would help if you’ve got a working knowledge of WordPress but this isn’t a dealbreaker at all.
What will we expect you to do: you’ll be asked to provide roughly one blog post every couple of weeks (of roughly 500 words), though obviously you can submit more than this if you want to! We’ll also want you to go along to various local events and maybe do round-ups of what’s going on. You may also be asked to interview people occasionally, and have to look after the We Are Cardiff Twitter feed sometimes.
There’s no payment for this, sad face. We Are Cardiff is an entirely voluntary project – no one makes any money from it. HOWEVER, it was recently named as one of the world’s best city blogs by the Guardian, so it would probably look pretty good on your CV 🙂
If you’re interested, please apply by writing 400 words about yourself and your interests – and tell us about your favourite Cardiff secret. Could be a place, or a band, or an author – anything at all.
Well, March was a pretty busy month on the blog, so I thought I’d do a quick round up to pull together some of the best stuff. Read on!
FOUR WEEKS IN CARDIFF – STREET PHOTOGRAPHY BY RHIAN RICHARDS
March was the the start of our Instagram project, where we handed over our Instagram account to a Cardiff resident and got them to document their journeys through the city that month. Rhian Richards broke our Instagram project cherry (ooer!) and took some damn fine snaps in the process. In April, Elizabeth Watt will be taking over – follow her on our We Are Cardiff Instagram. If you fancy taking over the feed for a month this year, contact us on wearecardiff@gmail.com.
We featured someone who was truly, actually ‘kick-ass’ on the site – Muay Thai fighter TANYA MERRETT told us about how she got into the sport and explained a little about her background and her training schedule. Click the image or her name to read her story. Her next fight is on 6 April 2014 – good luck Tanya!
Excitingly for me (and I’m sure thousands of Cultural Criticism/English Literature students from Cardiff uni), one of my old lecturers NEIL BADMINGTON wrote up some of his memories of Cardiff from his youth and his favourite spots here now. Click his name or the picture of his hometown Penarth to read that feature.
We also featured our first story from a Cardiff ex-pat. Having come across the We Are Cardiff site a few years back, ex-Cardiffian-current-Londoner James Davies was inspired to write about his memories of living here. We’ve got an excerpt here or click over to James Davies’ website to read the whole thing.
Photography lecturer RICHARD stopped by to tell us why he’s starting to think of Cardiff rather than his native St Ives as home these days…
AND …. MOST IMPORTANTLY … we supported CEO Sleepout Cardiff, supporting Llamau, Cardiff Foodbank and Service Leavers Wales.
We Are Cardiff 