Moving to Cardiff

Insurance & financial services

Admiral Group, Principality Building Society, Legal & General, Confused.com, Hodge, Starling Bank's Cardiff office

Admiral is the only FTSE 100 company headquartered in Wales and grew from a standing start in Cardiff in 1993 into the anchor of a genuine insurance cluster — which is why the city has far more actuarial, underwriting and claims work than its size suggests.

Broadcasting, film & television

BBC Cymru Wales at Central Square, ITV Cymru Wales, Bad Wolf at Wolf Studios Wales, Gorilla, S4C's Cardiff operations

Doctor Who was revived in Cardiff in 2005 and the production infrastructure that grew around it never left; Bad Wolf's Wolf Studios in Cardiff Bay has since made His Dark Materials, A Discovery of Witches and Industry. Wales punches far above its weight in high-end television and the crews live here.

Government & the public sector

Welsh Government, the Senedd, Companies House, Welsh Revenue Authority, Natural Resources Wales, Cardiff and Vale University Health Board

Cardiff is a capital, so it holds an entire national government layer that other UK cities of this size do not: ministries, a parliament, a revenue authority and the UK's company registry, which has been headquartered here since 1976. Public administration is a much larger share of professional employment than in Bristol or Leeds.

Higher education & research

Cardiff University, Cardiff Metropolitan, University of South Wales, the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff, the Brain Research Imaging Centre

Cardiff University is Wales' only Russell Group institution and its neuroscience and mental-health research is genuinely world-leading — CUBRIC houses some of the most powerful brain scanners in Europe. The three universities together put around 60,000 students into a city of 360,000.

Compound semiconductors & advanced electronics

IQE, the Institute for Compound Semiconductors at Cardiff University, the CSconnected cluster, the Newport wafer fabs a few miles east

South Wales hosts the densest concentration of compound semiconductor capability in the UK — the materials that go into 5G front ends, lidar and photonics rather than logic chips. Cardiff supplies the research half and Newport, twelve miles away, the manufacturing half.

Sport, events & hospitality

Principality Stadium, Cardiff City Stadium, Sophia Gardens, the Wales Millennium Centre, Welsh Rugby Union

A 74,500-seat national stadium sits in the middle of the city centre rather than on a ring road, which is unusual anywhere in Europe. On an international or a stadium concert the city genuinely fills, the streets close and the hospitality economy takes a week's trade in a day.

Landmark · City centre, at the top of St Mary Street

A Roman fort wall, a Norman motte and William Burges's riotous Victorian Gothic interiors for the third Marquess of Bute, with 130 acres of parkland running north behind it along the Taff.

Local tip: The Bute family gave the castle and the park to the city in 1947, which is why the green wedge runs unbroken from the castle wall out to Llandaff — you can walk or cycle from the city centre to the cathedral entirely through parkland. The Burges interiors need the paid tour; the Animal Wall along the south side is free and better than it sounds.

Culture · Between St Mary Street, the Hayes and Queen Street

Six surviving glass-roofed shopping arcades — Castle, High Street, Morgan, Royal, Wyndham and Duke Street — threaded between the main streets, full of independent shops.

Local tip: Cardiff has more surviving Victorian and Edwardian arcades than any other UK city and calls itself the City of Arcades because of them. Spillers in Morgan Arcade claims to be the oldest record shop in the world, trading since 1894. Walk them in the rain, which is when the roofs earn their keep.

Landmark · Two miles south of the centre

The old Tiger Bay docks, cut off from the tide by the barrage in 1999 and turned into a freshwater lake, with the Senedd, the Wales Millennium Centre and the Norwegian Church around it.

Local tip: Read the Millennium Centre's inscription before you go in — Gwyneth Lewis's 'Creu Gwir fel Gwydr o Ffwrnais Awen' and 'In These Stones Horizons Sing', in six-foot letters, and not a translation of one another. Behind the waterfront is Butetown, one of Britain's oldest multi-ethnic communities, whose history is the reason Cardiff exists at the scale it does. The Bay is the postcard; Butetown is the story.

Food · A mile north-east of the centre

The best eating in Cardiff, in a run of Turkish grills, Persian bakeries, Indian and Bangladeshi kitchens, Chinese supermarkets and late-night cafes along two ordinary residential high streets.

Local tip: City Road does the grills and the late hours; Albany Road does the delis, the bakeries and the daytime. Go on a weekday evening, order at a counter rather than a table, and ignore any list that sends you to the Bay for dinner.

Nightlife · City centre, under the castle wall

A single short street of small music venues — Clwb Ifor Bach, Fuel, the Moon — that has been the spine of Cardiff's live scene for forty years.

Local tip: The 'Save Womanby Street' campaign in 2017 fought off flats and a hotel that would have closed the venues by noise complaint, and won planning protection for the street. Clwb Ifor Bach was founded in 1983 as a Welsh-language club and still is one — the name means Little Ifor's Club, and Welsh-language gigs are a large part of what it does.

Nature · Roath, two miles north-east of the centre

A long Victorian park built along a dammed brook, with a boating lake, a botanic glasshouse and a small white lighthouse standing in the water at the southern end.

Local tip: The lighthouse is a memorial to Captain Scott, whose Terra Nova sailed for Antarctica from Cardiff on 15 June 1910 and never came back — the city funded much of the expedition, which is why the memorial is here rather than in London. There is a model of the ship inside. Most people who feed the ducks beside it have no idea what it is.