A stunning new photography book is giving people a completely fresh perspective on Cardiff, shot entirely from rooftops across the Welsh capital.
Cardiff From The Rooftops by Chris Hunt takes readers on a sky-high tour of a city that most people think they already know. From the ornate Victorian arcades in the city centre to the sweeping seafront at Cardiff Bay, and from the iconic stadiums that dominate the skyline to the quieter residential streets that rarely get a second glance, the book reframes Cardiff as a place worth looking at all over again.
What makes the book stand out is how it manages to capture both the grand and the everyday. Cardiff is a city that has changed dramatically over the past few decades, and Hunt’s aerial vantage points put that transformation into sharp focus. You can see old and new sitting side by side, historic architecture rubbing shoulders with modern development, and green spaces threading their way through an increasingly busy urban landscape.
The Victorian arcades, which are among the finest in Europe, look particularly spectacular from above. Seen from street level they are impressive enough, but from the rooftops you get a real sense of how they slot into the wider city grid, a network of covered passages that have been at the heart of Cardiff life for well over a century.
Cardiff Bay also features heavily, and rightly so. The regeneration of the waterfront area is one of the most significant changes the city has seen in living memory, and the photographs show just how far that part of Cardiff has come. The Senedd, the Wales Millennium Centre, and the surrounding waterfront developments all appear in a new light when viewed from height.
Then there are the stadiums. Cardiff is a city that takes its sport seriously, and the Principality Stadium in particular is a beast of a structure that dominates its corner of the city centre. From the rooftops, you get a proper sense of its scale and how it sits within the surrounding streets, something you simply cannot appreciate from ground level.
But the book is not just about the big landmarks. Hunt also turns his lens on the parts of Cardiff that do not usually make it onto postcards. Ordinary streets, local parks, and neighbourhood roofscapes all get their moment, and in doing so the book builds up a picture of Cardiff as a living, breathing city rather than just a collection of tourist attractions.
For anyone with an interest in Welsh heritage, urban photography, or contemporary architecture, this is a genuinely worthwhile addition to the bookshelf. It works as a coffee table book, as a document of a city in the middle of an ongoing transformation, and as a reminder that sometimes the best way to understand a place is to look at it from a completely different angle.
Cardiff From The Rooftops is the kind of book that makes locals see their own city differently, and gives visitors a reason to look beyond the obvious. In a city that is still very much finding its feet as a modern European capital, that kind of fresh perspective feels timely.