Stay Beautiful — The Vulcan Hotel: A Pub, A Museum
With its magnificent green tiled exterior blending with the restored ironmongers and sweet shop in the recreated village at St Fagans Museum in Cardiff, the Vulcan Hotel appears unchanged since 1915.
The barman, wearing an Edwardian style apron and cap, draws my Cwrw Vulcan ale from the other side of the curved wooden bar. Across the sawdust-strewn floorboards is a settle by the fireplace, spittoon at its side.
A brewery mirror reflects the light filtering in through the leaded pub windows, emphasising the sense of airy utility. After drinking my pint, I wander past wooden partitions into a spartanly furnished back parlour, past posters warning of World War I air raids.
Until 2012, this building housed a pub in Cardiff City centre—a very ordinary pub that had stood for over 150 years serving an eclectic urban community. Its interior, crammed full with fruit machines, a jukebox and an outsize ship's wheel on the wall, was a sanctuary from the relentless redevelopment and expansion of the capital city—development that eventually forced its demolition.
And, as for its handpumps, they've been responsible for sparking a heated controversy about beer authenticity.
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The Vulcan Hotel reopened in May 2024, having been demolished, transported, and rebuilt brick-by-brick in the museum, restored to its appearance a century ago within the curated historic village. Even though rebuilding it took just over a decade, the Vulcan still holds fresh memories. Many visitors around me point out familiar architectural features, like the two front doors or the two-room layout, and remark that it feels like “only yesterday” since they last visited.
Illustrations by Frank Duffy
Dafydd Wiliam, Principal Curator of Historic Buildings at the museum tells me that the building is inherently linked to the history of Newtown, built around 1830 to service Cardiff docks, where Irish immigrant workers endured harsh conditions in densely packed two up, two downs. The Vulcan was first recorded as a pub in 1853.
Newtown remained dominantly Irish but was condemned as a slum by the 1930s. "The community hung on until most of Newtown was demolished in 1968," Dafydd says. "After that, there were only industrial premises in that area: meat warehouses, abattoirs, and so on."
Remarkably, The Vulcan survived, becoming what Dafydd calls "one of the first buildings to be built in Newtown, and certainly the last building in Newtown." Why it survived when neighbouring pubs didn't remains a mystery.
The pub changed hands over the years—it was owned by Crosswells in 1915 before Brains brewery took over in 1956. For the next several decades Dafydd says times were hard for the pub: "The Vulcan struggled for many years after its community was dispersed and it was always on the outskirts of the town centre." As he puts it, "the Vulcan wasn't a place you went to. It was a place you went to on the way to your destination."
““Progress would change everything that I love about somewhere like the Vulcan””
The pub's renaissance began with the "Cool Cymru" period in the 1990s. Catatonia and other musicians would hang out there. James Dean Bradfield of South Wales band the Manic Street Preachers talked to the Guardian about the pub in 2011: "Progress would change everything that I love about somewhere like the Vulcan, somewhere that seems to seep history through the very walls."
The University of South Wales opened the ATRiuM Building opposite the Vulcan in 2007, housing the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries. The new campus brought a big new lease of life to the Vulcan and lots of younger customers.
Unfortunately for the Vulcan's new patrons, the forces of urban regeneration that brought the university to Newtown already had the pub's days numbered. The site was earmarked by planners for a multi-storey car park to service the new St David's 2 shopping centre development. In 2008, Cardiff Council served a compulsory purchase order on Brains brewery for the Vulcan.
The media-savvy, articulate new customers from across the road launched a fight to Save the Vulcan, making full use of emerging tech platforms, like blogs and Facebook. This remarkably successful online campaign resulted in extensive media interest. Jeremy Vine presented his BBC Radio Two show from the Vulcan's bar one lunchtime, and it also featured in arts programmes as a gritty, "authentic" backdrop, such as a Culture Show interview with John Cale, ex-of the Velvet Underground.
The “Save the Vulcan” blog and Facebook pages still host a remarkable selection of photographs and videos of the pub from this period, including Star Wars and Hallowe'en parties, and celebrations of the latest campaign successes. The videos show the clientele as a happy, mixed bunch of locals, students and creatives. Landlady Liz Smart, who ran the pub from 1992 until 2010, is often pictured overseeing festivities with a genial smile.
In hindsight, the campaign itself is something of a historical curiosity—a digital time capsule of early, idealistic social media. St Fagans Museum will preserve the blog along with the pub.
In 2009, the year after it was earmarked for demolition, the Vulcan won a temporary reprieve. The developers promised to leave it alone for three years.
It would be wonderful to believe that the heartfelt campaigning of The Vulcan’s locals was the sole reason for this change of heart, but the global financial crisis of the late 2000s had its own part to play. Speculative property developments on the fringes of city centres everywhere were halted or even abandoned. Artists, creatives and even craft beer entrepreneurs moved into the vacuum.
Time was called on the Vulcan in May 2012, although Dafydd Wiliam reflects, "The Vulcan was oddly thriving when it closed."
The Welsh heritage body CADW rejected listing the building, saying there were other pubs of the same age in Cardiff with better surviving original features. Ironically, the only option that avoided the Vulcan facing the wrecking ball—moving the pub to St Fagans—was only possible because of the failure to achieve listed status. Listed buildings can't be moved but can be demolished in certain circumstances.
Due to the campaign, the Vulcan of the late 2000s is remarkably well documented with many videos and photos still online, leaving a legacy archive of a truly unique time in Cardiff’s history.
Nearly twenty years after the Vulcan was first threatened and then dismantled, no multi-storey car park or other development has yet materialised on the site.
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The Tavistock Hotel in Roath, another inner-city suburb of Cardiff, is run by Shirley Roberts, the current Chairman of Cardiff Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).
It's a spring Saturday afternoon and there's a mellow atmosphere in the public bar—likely the result of more than a few daytime pints being sunk than originally intended. Looking around, these customers are mostly lager and Guinness drinkers but Shirley has successfully introduced cask ale, of which I enjoy an excellent pint of Into the Valley by local Welsh brewery Grey Trees.
The other drinkers huddle around a couple of tables. They're mainly men on the cusp of retirement, all familiar with each other, with the air of the pub being a second home. Between sips on pints, eyes alternate between the racing on the television and the form guides in their newspapers. Most pop outside every so often to enjoy a cigarette. Shirley tells me that during term time she also has a loyal student clientele, who rub along very respectfully with the locals. I imagine the atmosphere might not be too dissimilar to the Vulcan of twenty or thirty years ago.
When Shirley introduces me to the lads as being interested in the Vulcan, I'm welcomed into the circle. To my surprise, most here were occasional visitors at the very least, and are eager to share their stories.
Dave Halpin said his father moved to the area when the pub functioned as a labour exchange for dockers. He recalls the pub being surrounded by the vibrant industry around the docks. "I remember the Irish women loading and unloading potatoes."
““...good atmosphere with guitars and good Brains’ dark””
Dave and his fellow drinkers argue over the names and locations of the many other, now lost, pubs in Newtown. He has fond memories of drinking in the Vulcan himself, singling out its "good atmosphere with guitars and good Brains' dark." He recollects the pub's thick fug of smoke and how it frequently offered regulars "stop-ons". Dave would often drop into the Vulcan himself before going on elsewhere.
Brian Francis, secretary of the Cardiff CAMRA branch, says: "In the 1980s and 90s the Vulcan management would give us exclusive use of the rear lounge for meetings. They would even close the serving hatch for our privacy. When we called a 'beer break', out would come the most substantial of sandwiches. On special occasions, there would also be chips." It won the local CAMRA's Pub of the Year in 2009.
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Why restore The Vulcan to a perpetual 1915?
"We have copies of the architectural plans of the renovation work that happened in 1914/15," Dafydd Wiliam from St Fagan’s Museum explains. "That's when the glazed tiled facade was added and Cardiff was at its peak as a coal port—an industrial powerhouse."
The museum preserved what it could of the original fabric but little had survived to 2012 except a timber partition, some windows and the elephantine gents urinals. Their salt glaze has been restored to a distinctive orangey-brown, well remembered by generations of drinkers.
The restoration was particularly complex. To be a functioning pub it needed to have modern legal requirements fitted discreetly, such as fire detection systems and security cameras.
As accurately as the building had been restored, controversy erupted when the pub reopened in May 2024, but rather than finding fault with the architecture or the décor, it was beer authenticity that drew attention.
The museum recruited Hayley Budd as pub manager, a seasoned Cardiff licensee. Her experience suggested that the irregular pattern of visitors (more on sunny weekends rather than winter days) meant that cask ale, the museum's original ambition, wouldn't turn over quickly enough to maintain quality. The decision was taken to serve a range of keg beers supplied by Glamorgan Brewery. But the reconstruction's historical exactitude demanded handpumps.
It coincided with a national CAMRA campaign against "fake" handpumps used by big breweries and pubcos. While welcoming the pub restoration, the local CAMRA branch protested about the handpumps’ inauthenticity, saying that the public was being seriously misled. The matter was referred to Trading Standards.
But is the beer itself authentically historic? I asked beer historian Ron Pattinson. For a Cardiff pub in 1915, he says, "The draught beers would have been cask served by handpump but mild would have been the main draught beer. And a bitter too, in Crosswells's case, called IPA. Surprisingly, there might also have been a bottled lager."
“Do we have any more right to demand a closed pub is restored to its 2012 state than the drinkers of 1915 would have wanted their own experience preserved?”
The handpump controversy illuminates deeper questions about authenticity in heritage preservation. Welsh culture blogger Dic Mortimer, involved with the Save the Vulcan campaign, wrote, "Saving the Vulcan was never just about saving the building, but about saving a working public house in Newtown. When it was still open the Vulcan was an outdated hindrance to Cardiff's vibrant thrust…as soon as it's shut…it's a national treasure."
But do we have any more right to demand a closed pub is restored to its 2012 state than the drinkers of 1915 would have wanted their own experience preserved?
Recreating even recent experience has its limits. The "fug of beer and smoke" that Dave Halpin so strongly remembers would be sensually immersive,but also illegal today.
Dafydd estimates the reconstructed pub "will have around 600,000 visitors a year. I don't know if the Vulcan had 600,000 visitors in its lifetime."
But has a community that gave this very ordinary pub its 150-year life been replaced by a procession of temporary visitors?
Many questions follow about pub preservation, even the essence of the pub as an institution.
But perhaps Dafydd’s simple observation about the universality of pub experience cuts through these complexities: "There's nothing nicer than having a beer by a warm fire."
But what beer to serve through the handpumps? A rigorous approach to authenticity may have seen dubious quality mild being served to modern day visitors, discouraging them from queueing up for souvenirs at the museum gift shop (of which there are an impressive range).
Whether authentically served by handpump or not.
