Former Cattle Market Tavern (now The City Arms), Cardiff

Former Cattle Market Tavern, Quay Street, Cardiff

This pub, now The City Arms, was originally the Cattle Market Tavern. The present name was adopted after Cardiff was officially chosen as the capital of Wales in 1955. Cardiff had become a city in 1905.

When the Cattle Market Tavern was auctioned in 1871, it was described as an “old established” public house near the cattle market and slaughterhouse. Butchers would drink at the pub after working at the abattoir.

The tavern’s licensee, John Dolman, was fined 40 shillings (more than £240 in today’s money) for keeping a disorderly public house here in 1867. He was a butcher by trade and employed as his pub manager a man who had previously been refused a license because of poor discipline. A police constable had visited the premises and saw “a good deal of disorder”. The manager was drunk and a farmer was trying to find his hat, which the other drinkers pretended they hadn't taken.

Cattle drover John Hurtnell was jailed for two months in 1882 for stealing a walking stick at the tavern and assaulting the policeman who came to arrest him.

Saddlers met here in 1889 and agreed to form the South Wales branch of the trade union, after a delegate from Manchester told them how saddlers there were receiving higher wages as a result of being in the union. Welsh saddlers were unhappy with working long hours and thought their pay was too low for their skilled labour. They made and repaired saddles and harnesses for horses.

Daniel Jenkins, licensee of the Cattle Market Tavern, collected donations in 1892 for families affected by the Parc Slip coal-mine disaster in Tondu, near Bridgend, which killed 112 men and boys.

Postcode: CF10 1EA    View Location Map