Here's a short piece of prose I wrote about a nearby street. Hope you enjoy it!
City Road, Cardiff. It’s eleven or twelve in the evening and spitefully cold; the kind of cold that crunches up your abdominal muscles and stiffens your jaw, a reminder that you really should be inside. Curry-houses, kebab shops, convenience stores and takeaways squeeze claustrophobically into the terraces that line the street. They compete for the attention of drunken punters, shamelessly displaying themselves with a spectrum of gaudy electric signs and the promise of warmth. Neon reflections dance in black puddles as the sharp November rain expertly maintains its war of attrition.
There are a lot of people about, despite the time and the weather. Three girls huddle under an umbrella outside a pub, sharing a cigarette and shivering, whilst a couple men in tracksuits argue in a bus stop. A student slumps awkwardly in a doorway, too drunk to walk, to think. His phone rings pleadingly in his pocket, but it goes un-noticed. Welcome to Orange answer phone. He’s not the only casualty of the night; a bin bag lies wounded in the gutter beside him, spilling its insides over the pavement. It stinks, overpowering the salty smell of döner meat and cooking fat that pumps from steaming vents above the kebab-house window. An oblivious ambulance blares towards town, kicking up a fine spray from the saturated road.
Further up the street, anonymous shouts of anger are drowned out by a modified hatchback screaming invasively as it pulls away from a set of traffic lights. It elicits a loud ‘wanker!’ from a herd of forty-somethings on a hen night. They clip-clop in an unsteady human chain to the next bar, screeching, giggling and singing Abba hits to anyone they pass.
Across the road, a group of dismal buildings stand; some dilapidated with boarded windows and heavy, padlocked doors. Amongst them is the Spin bowling alley, one of the only detached structures on City Road. Once popular, it now looks grim and foreboding, as if becoming slowly amalgamated into the terrace. In the darkness, ivy tendrils sprout from cracks in the asphalt, pulling the building down into the gum speckled street.
Night edges on. Gradually, the rain gives up. Stumbling drunks are replaced by early morning joggers. The cold sky streaks soft orange as first light yawns. Sequined satin glimmers emerald in the window of the sari shop.
I always thought the junction got its morbid nickname from the chaotic traffic (anyone who's driven there will know it can get a bit dodgy, especially at rush hour), but a small plaque I noticed on the wall of the NatWest revealed something a lot more intriguing:
After a bit of Googling, I discovered that the junction is in fact the site of the old Gallows Field, where countless criminals (and, apparently, innocents) were hung. The men mentioned on the plaque were priests hung for practising Catholicism, which was outlawed at the time.
