Taken in Time

Photographer John Briggs continues his project to document change in the Cardiff docklands, revisiting the sites and people memorably recorded in Before the Deluge.

In the last thirty years landmark buildings have been demolished, docks filled in, the barrage built, maritime businesses closed, and streets disappeared. In their place, a huge redevelopment scheme, gentrification, and tourism. Among the frantic activity, local communities face up to their changing landscape, with the implications it brings. With characteristic honesty and an eye for compelling detail, John Briggs brings these changes to a wider audience in this not to be missed book.

"Adamsdown, the Black Bridge, lower Splott, the mud of the river Rymmney… are all here. Old Cardiff, hard Cardiff, real Cardiff, and certainly not the Cardiff the Tourist Board would use to attract new visitors. It has taken a Minnesotan resident in Newport to catch these things. Long may he continue.'
Planet

John Briggs was born in 1947 in St Paul, Minnesota. He came to Wales in the 1960s to study at Atlantic College in the Vale of Glamorgan, where an increasing passion for photography resulted in his first street images of Cardiff. He gained a degree in French at the University of Minnesota, also working as a part-time reporter. In 1947, returning to Wales to do teacher traning at University College, Cardiff, he began systematically photographing the city's disppearing docklands.