Cardiff - Part 1

Another first for this blog - over the border into Wales.

Our usual starting point - the railway station. Cardiff Central has two clocks - firstly this one in a tower above the main station building:

....and secondly this one in the booking hall:

Out of the railway station and into the sunshine of Cardiff. At the end of St Mary Street is this rather unusual example - a clock mounted in a glass case rather like a giant telephone box.

The mechanism is labelled W. Potts & Sons Leeds 1897, although the clock face appears to be a modern addition. "Potts of Leeds : Five Generations of Clockmakers" by Michael S. Potts refers to an 1897 clock installed in the Bute Dock Buildings - the mechanism was removed in 1975 to a private collection in the USA but subsequently repatriated. Is this that mechanism?

Further along St Mary Street is a rather plain clock on the House of Fraser. But it is clean and functional.

And a little bit further down the road is the first bilingual clock that I have come across. If your Welsh is not up to scratch....

.....the other side shows that this is Cardiff Market.

The entrance to the actual market hall is overshadowed by this huge clock.

Alas, the "everite time" is now "everong" time.

They certainly seem keen on the time in the market, as a third clock can be found within the market hall.

Back outside, St Mary Street morphs into High Street. And high up above the street, and not obviously visible as you walk past it, is a clock on Hodge House.

If the Hodge House clock is not obvious, it is hard to miss the one on Cardiff Castle as you come to the end of High Street. I love the statues.

Castles have strong associations with fairy tales, but you would have to be away with fairies to imagine that this next building is in the same architectural league. This is Plas Glyndwr on Kingsway, facing the eastern side of the castle.

Not a great looking building, but hey it has a clock.

And just around the corner plain architecture is replaced by the splendours of City Hall and its ornate clock tower.

Finally, next door to the National Museum. This clock is inside the grand entrance hall.

A special thanks to Carol who, despite the detailed regulations on taking photographs in the museum, agreed that I did not have to fill in the lengthy form to allow me to publish this picture on a website. She also told me about the Potts clock in the glass case, which I would otherwise have missed in my whistle stop tour of Cardiff. So a double hurrah for Carol.