In The Daily Telegraph last month (Saturday, September 15th) there was a splendid feature on cafes entitled 'Take your seat at a window onto the world'. In it the author, Chris Moss, listed his 50 favourite international cafes. One of them was the Kardomah in Swansea.
I was delighted by this. I come from Swansea, I have had many a good
chat and cup of coffee in the Kardomah, and I can vouch for the fact
that it is great value and great fun. In fact, back in 2014, the
centenary of the birth of Dylan Thomas, I proposed a neon artwork
celebrating Dylan and the Kardomah, to be mounted on the cafe's facade,
and I was delighted when Locws International commissioned it as a
permanent installation, part of their 'Art Across the City' programme.
As Chris Moss writes in his article, the current cafe 'is not the
original Swansea Kardomah - Hitler put paid to that in 1941 - but it
feels and looks like it'. And the name Kardomah will always be
associated with Dylan. As a young man he used to meet there with his
friends, putting the world to rights, and in his radio broadcast Return Journey
he describes, with great humour, everything they used to talk about -
'music and poetry and painting and politics', 'communism, symbolism,
Bradman, Braque', and (the best line of all, and the one I used for the
neon) 'Michelangelo, ping-pong, ambition, Sibelius and girls ...'
Swansea has become quite a centre for cultural excellence - the Swansea
International Festival 2018 has just ended - and this autumn, between
27th October and 4th November, there will be a number of further
exhibitions and events taking place in the city. Among them will be a
guided tour of the Swansea Dylan knew. Find out more about what's going
on from Swansea's Dylan Thomas Centre (www.dylanthomas.com) - and make
sure you have a coffee in the Kardomah!
www.artacrossthecity.com
