Peter Finch is perhaps the foremost chronicler of Cardiff, past and present. His response to the 2020 lockdown restrictions confining people to their local authority area was to begin walking the boundary of his. This was in a mirror of his long walk along the south Wales coast recorded in Edging the Estuary.
The Cardiff border rarely appears on maps. The city is no longer has walls (like York or Chester), or a modern transport périphérique like London’s M25. Instead its dotted line boundary travels across fields, along motorways, up rivers, through forests, over rail tracks and along miles of intertidal mudflats following the edge of the Severn. The border itself is made up of waymarked trails, city streets, highway liminal zones, woodlands. Mud-soaked tracks up hillsides, bridges, diversions, disentanglements and discoveries all play a part in this informative text created for walkers and armchair travellers alike.
Edging the City explores (often literally) why and where borders exist, their purposes, their love of water courses. It discusses other cities with walkable borders including York, Chester, London, Paris, Bruges and Seoul. It considers legal and geopolitical reasons for borders (the battles over placement of ‘Welcome’ signs, for instance), how they change and what happens when politics crosses boundaries. Cardiff’s medieval and other boundaries are tracked. The border is walked, run and sailed. Finch talks to ultra runners who have traversed the 50 plus mile route in a single day. He provides textual diversions on border history, north Cardiff trees, words for mounds, the mountains of Cardiff, the city’s coalmines, its triads, historical figures, battles, hill forts, poets, politicians, housing developments and other divertissements. There’s a city’s edge playlist which filled the author’s head as he strode available on Spotify. Edging the City is a view of Cardiff like no other, full of insights and discoveries.
Author Biography:
Peter Finch is a poet, writer, performer, walker and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff. He has been a publisher, organisation manager, periodical editor, event organiser, literary agent and literary promoter. He was at the forefront of the UK’s small press revolution in the 60s and the 70s with his magazine Second Aeon and pioneered performance poetry in Wales during the 1980s. From 1974 to 1995 he ran the Oriel Bookshop in Cardiff. From 1996 to 2011 he was Chief Executive of Yr Academi Gymreig / The Welsh Academy, an organisation which was later rebranded as Literature Wales.
He specialises in books about the Welsh capital including the successful Real Cardiff series (4 volumes, most recently Real Cardiff: The Flourishing City), Edging The Estuary and the more recent Edging The City, and The Roots Of Rock From Cardiff To Mississippi And Back. His latest books written alongside the work of photographer John Briggs are Walking The Valleys and Walking Cardiff.
If Finch is anything from all the above he is also a poet. His numerous poetry titles include Zen Cymru, Useful, Poems for Ghosts, Food and Selected Later Poems and The Machineries of Joy from Seren, Antibodies from Stride, and Vizet, a selected poems in Hungarian from Kronkét Könyvek. Important work from across the last fifty years were brought together in his two volume Collected Poems which was published in 2022.
