I was trying to imagine how the pub would feel about moving from a working-class suburb near the Cardiff docks and into this quiet museum in the grounds of a stately home.
The Vulcan Hotel is Transported from Adam Street, Adamsdown, to St Fagans National Museum of History
Like all pubs I was gorgeous in my prime.
Glistening, fresh from my refurbishment,
named for a Roman god of smelting fire.
In the war years I dug deep. Sheltered waves
of incomers from ship and street. Served my
regulars, cosy as a cave. Opened
like a palm to bewildered returners,
outmanoeuvred the post-war slump, observed
the race riots of nineteen-nineteen. Held
my nerve in the wake of economic
decline. Stood firm against years of closure.
Consoled and cheered the recently dismissed.
Saw regulars dispersed, neighbours bulldozed.
Hosted incoming fleets of youngsters who
loved me. Despite this, resisting despair,
I endured repeated death sentences
and reprieves, alone in my own street, lost,
adrift, defiant, crumbling to sand,
no longer commercially viable,
my varnish chipped, an anachronism
in a zone ear-marked for development
until this hard-brokered release, this fresh
tide came to deconstruct me brick by brick,
transplant me and restore me, tile for tile.
So I survive; intact, rescued here to
birdsong and unfamiliar inland winds
like an elderly servant, or war bride.
I really enjoyed this poem and how vividly it captures multiple eras. When I moved to Cardiff for university in 2008, I lived in student accommodation overlooking The Vulcan Hotel: from my window I looked down upon a large tarmacked carpark, a gleaming university building, and that tiny, anachronistically tiled pub sandwiched between them. When, years later, I saw in St Fagans museum that it was being transplanted and would survive as a cultural relic, I was delighted. Considering how important the notion of time is to this poem, in moving from ‘the war years’ to the present day, how much research did you have to undertake in order to accurately illustrate the building’s history?
Like yourself, I was delighted to hear that The Vulcan Hotel was going to be preserved, albeit in a new location. I think it’s a beautiful building, and I loved how an ordinary working-class pub had acquired a kind of heroic status over the years as the demographic of the area changed. I’m especially excited that it’s going to remain a working pub. I’d been following the story of its potential rescue with interest for some time before I decided to channel my fascination into a poem.
I suppose I’d done a lot of accidental research, falling down various online rabbit holes connected to the history of Cardiff. I did some more explicit fact-checking of dates etc, when I started writing the poem, and that’s when I decided to begin the narrative at the time of the 1915 refurbishment, which is the year the museum has chosen for their interpretation year. There’s something glorious and quintessentially Cardiffian about that beautiful tiled façade going on to weather the storms of history.
I was also able to draw on my own memories of frequenting the iconic Brains pubs of Cardiff during the ‘years of closure’ I refer to in the poem – the build up to the miners’ strike and its aftermath. I really loved those pubs, which I hope comes across in this poem. I was interested in the parallels between what was happening to this individual pub and what was happening elsewhere in industrial South Wales. The embattled pub felt like a representation of the lives of ordinary people at a time of enormous social upheaval.
You’ve chosen the pub itself as narrator. What helped you decide to write from this perspective, and did you try out any other perspectives in earlier drafts?
I knew from the very start that I wanted to write from the point of view of the pub, because I wanted to merge the human stories associated with the building with the history of the building itself. I played around with different voices at first, including, briefly, the voice of the Roman god Vulcan himself. However, that voice seemed at odds with my desire to draw on the nurturing, consoling aspect of the pub’s ‘personality’.
The first line came to me quite suddenly after I’d been thinking about the 1915 refurbishment and everything sort of tumbled out from there. The deep green of the tiles reminded me of a velvet dress, and I began to envisage the pub as an energetic, confident young person all dressed up to the nines. In my mind I heard the voice of a Cardiff character who might have managed the pub or worked in the pub, moving from youth to old age, navigating history in the same way the building did.
The poem stops at the point of the pub being reconstructed in St Fagans National Museum of History. Indeed, it ends rather haltingly, suggesting that it goes on to survive in drastically unfamiliar circumstances. What influenced your decision to place an increased emphasis on that sense of displacement as opposed to new life?
That’s an interesting question. I was trying to imagine how the pub would feel about moving from a working-class suburb near the Cardiff docks and into this quiet museum in the grounds of a stately home. I thought there might be an element of trepidation. I think St Fagans National Museum of History is an amazing place that does fantastic work in celebrating the cultural heritage of Wales through the preservation of iconic buildings. But being a ‘cultural relic’, as you describe it in your first question, is not the same as being a thriving pub at the heart of a community. As I was writing the poem I found a sense of ambivalence creeping into my initial sense of delight at the ‘rescue’. I kept thinking of Joni Mitchell’s line in ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ – “They took all the trees/Put ‘em in a tree museum”.
On a personal level, maybe some of my own feelings of displacement following a change of career, ongoing changes in my family life, and anxiety about my place in the world as someone who is approaching retirement age, probably found their way in there as well…
Please share with us the one thing that’s transformed your writing practice that you wish you knew earlier.
One of the things I love about writing poetry is how it enables you to discover surprising things about yourself – feelings you wouldn’t have been aware of if you hadn’t started writing the poem. Recently, encouraged by the wonderful tutors at the Out-Spoken Academy course I attended in early 2025, I’ve been experimenting with creating a ‘wilder’ first draft that comes from a place of ‘not-knowing’, rather than setting out to tell people something I already know. This has sometimes meant starting to write about something I know very little about to see what my imagination will come up with. Then, during the redrafting process, I’ve been learning to go deeper into the strange, surreal place I’ve created without trying to impose a particular style or form on it too early. It was a big shift for me, but a very productive and enjoyable one.
Tamara Evans
Tamara Evans (she/her) was born and grew up in the Vale of Glamorgan in South Wales. Her poems have been selected to appear on buses in London and Brighton in Poetry on the Buses competitions, and published in Poetry Wales and the Write Out Loud Milestones Anthology. She lives in Sussex.
How I Write a Poem is an interview series digging in to the nitty-gritty of poetry writing. Explore the full series here.