As a child walking with my dad it seems for hours from the Westend of Barry through the ruined dock landscape, with open smelly sewers, derelict wooden coal trucks, and a Geest banana ship in the distance. Then along Cardiff Road with the smell of the chemicals from ICI and BP to Cadoc Crescent, was true endurance, as I was there to visit my grandparents Bill and Margaret Lines.
Passing on the way up from Cardiff Road to my grandparents house at 16 Cadoc Crescent; that had been a brand new house in 1948 when they bought it, after moving from Roxburgh House on Victoria Park Road in Cadoxton, there was a shop at the Eastern end of this curved street on the Corner of Cardiff Road and Cadoc Crescent.
A shop at number 72 Cardiff Road, was built in the 1890s, and showing on the 1898 Ordnance Survey. The shop is of redbrick more than likely from the newly opened; in the 1890s, brickworks over the road. With Bathstone type details unusually used for corner stones, and then for the fully framing of the windows.
I remember vaguely the smell of this shop, grocery like – earthy fresh vegetables and fruit, with sweets for sale, drinks and ice creams in a big freezer. My parents worked hard, but very little pocket money to spend in the shop. So with this in mind and the photo this week; taken on an overcast day – the days I remember in the 1980’s, I took to our Barry and District Museumeers page on Facebook, and asked for stories. They did not disappoint.
The weird thing is with this former shop, the memories of it are so clear. Nino Spiteri tells us the shop was called ‘Wardles’, he remembers that from the 1960-1970s there were two Wrigley chewing gum machines on the outside. My mum Sandra Langford remembered hoping that occasionally you would get two packs of Wrigley’s chewing gum for the price of one coin. Claire Ryan remembers the sweets, newspapers and groceries on sale at Wardles. And Mark Miller says it sold everything from tea to bread. Other names for the shop have been banded around also! Afterall it was a shop for a good 90 years.
Our Barry and District Museumeers page researcher John Anzevino came up with an interesting link with 72 Cardiff Road. 2 women who lived there, probably running the shop to boot, signed The Welsh Women’s Peace Petition in 1923. And there were members of my own family who signed it elsewhere in Barry, what a gem of a fact.
In the end the shop closed. Leanne Creed remembers her dad turning 72 Cardiff Road into flats sometime in the 1980s. Kyle Everett remembers living there with a load of lads after the conversion in the mid 1990’s. A fridge full of cans kept them happy that was ironically positioned where the old shop fridge was!
Another interesting piece of social history thanks to Nino Spiteri, is that a few doors away on the same block before Laura Street, there was 75 Cardiff Road, which was the ‘old Police station’, once with its own cells and the home also of Sergent Bumford.
