Hobos, Hiraeth & Old Haunts

Retracing footsteps through timelines, place and memory

Wandering the city, my feet re-find their way down side streets and pavements I’ve walked hundreds of times before. So familiar, yet significantly changed, this place surfaces tidal waves of twenty-something memories. Moving to Cardiff when I was 18 marked the teenage start of my wandering life. The place we leave home for is, in a way, a naive apprenticeship in map-making where we discover the world (and who we are in it) for ourselves. The Welsh capital is a relatively small city, perfect for walking. It was here, not the rural town I grew up in, that I first formed a relationship with my own two feet. Transitionary times indeed. Alice Maddicott (author of Tender Maps: Travels in Search of the Emotions of Place) writes:

“Picture your life like a timeline. It could be a dry task, like a history exercise in the classroom, but this timeline is different, it is pulsing. The rigid lines marking events can be there, but there is another line, thicker and fluid, which moves, appears unexpectedly, with this rainbow transparent skin of bubbles, flexing it’s surface, solid yet breakable, magic yet there. This line encases our adolescence like a strange evolving chrysalis. We move through its challenging soapy sparkles. We emerge the other side, its magic popped, yet transformed, new in feeling, the world all different, our adult lives waiting for us – that moment of how we felt in the world evaporated, remaining in small droplets, hanging in the air”

Alice Maddicott

Caerdydd (Cardiff in Welsh) is much more built up around the centre these days, which alters the urban landscape. New high-rise buildings and shopping centres would render Cardiff unnavigable to me if it were not for the many Victorian arcades which snake and criss-cross city streets, beckoning the curious with their beautiful archways and glass ceilings. The old market still has the same feel, and I do a loop around it in between weaving through the arcades. Landmarks of my early twenties surface: the iconic Spiller’s records, the retro shop I used to work in, the young man who lived upstairs above one of these crafted passageways.