A quarter of the population
of Wales lives within the boundaries of what were the
lordships of the Marquesses of Bute and their personal estates. These lands
were centred on Cardiff Castle, which was the Welsh home of the Stuarts, of the
Isle of Bute, from 1766 to 1947. Through their aristocratic status as Marquesses
of Bute, and owners of land, in and around Cardiff, and vast properties above
the eastern portion of the South Wales Coalfield, they wielded their
considerable socio-political power to create a huge human ecosystem
resourced by mining coal. This family enterprise involved engineering an
environment that resulted in the migration of people to the decayed market town
of Cardiff and equally to the inhospitable sparsely populated uplands to the
north, which became the hinterland of the largest docks in the world devoted
almost entirely to the export of coal.
In 1766, when Lord
Mountstuart of Bute married Charlotte Windsor, the daughter
and co- heiress of Lord Windsor, the lands of the Bute family were augmented
by a vast South Wales estate, which consisted of 11,211 acres of enclosed
land, together with rights over a vast area of common land within the manors of
east and mid Glamorgan. Within the town of Cardiff itself were 711 acres, with
another 2150 acres surrounding the town in the parishes of Roath, Llanishen,
Llandaf, Llandough, Leckwith, Cogan and Lavernock. Another tract of 3,400
acres was centred on Llantrisant. In the uplands of Glamorgan, extending from
the Rhymney ato the Neath valleys, there were 4,100 acres, with an additional
850 acres around the Vale towns of Cowbridge and Llantwit Major.
More land was purchased
by the family during the next one hundred and fifty
years, and by the end of the 19th century the Bute estate had a virtual monopoly
of land in the centre of Cardiff and the fringes of the town. By this time the family
estate amounted to about 22,000 acres. It was the possession of these
townlands, together with the extensive coastal grazing marshes around the
estauary of the Taff and Ely rivers to the south of the town, that enabled the Bute
family to generate wealth from a trio of resources; the rentals of urban
development, the royalties from the mining of upland coal, and tolls from the
passage of coal through the docklands that were created at the mouth of the
River Taff. This unique integration of townlands and docklands placed the Bute
estate among the richest personal properties of its size in the United Kingdom.
Its peak of prosperity
coincide with the first signs of exhaustion of the South
Wales mineral stocks. This factor, together with increasing professional
complexities of administration, the low yield of the dock investment, the
virtual
extinction of the political influence of those with landed property, and the need to
realise capital assets and to diversify investments, were all inducements to the
fourth marquess to dispose of his Glamorgan possessions. Urban land in the
industrial valleys was first put on the market in 1909, and this began a process
which culminated in a large series of sales at Aberdare, Treorci and Treherbert
in 1919 and 1920. Between 1915 and 1919 the Bute collieries were disposed
of, and in 1923 and 1924 a considerable proportion of the farms and other
freehold property within the coalfied was sold. In 1922 the Bute docks were
absorbed by the Great Western Railway Company.
In 1926 the surviving
Bute property, largely mineral land under lease and urban
land at Cardiff, was incorporated under the private family company of Mountjoy
Ltd. In 1938 Mountjoy sold its interests in leaseholds to the Western Ground
Rents Company, and in the same year mineral reserves became the property of
the state. By the second world war, therefore, all the major departments of Bute
estate administration had been extinguished.
The gift of the castle
to the corporation of Cardiff in 1947 was followed in 1950
by the deposit at the National Library of Wales of most of the papers relating to
the Bute estate in Glamorgan, an act which brought to a close the period during
which Bute administration dominated the cultural ecology of Cardiff and its
valley communities.
From the 1950s the
coal industry continued to decline and this was reflected in
the prospserity Cardiff's docklands, which by the 1970s were virtually derelict.
Through the workings of a government development corporation they were
cleared of their old industrial legacy and, as 'Cardiff Bay', land with a new
infrastructure was made available for business, housing and leisure. Cardiff Bay
may now be studied as a model of civil engineering applied to promote private
and public investment in post-industrialism, where 'living by water' is a major
international theme of cultural ecology.
