Hear more about this location(Need help with RealPlayer?)Before the Coal Exchange was built in Mountstuart Square it was a residential square with a central garden. It was taken over by commerce as the city grew in prosperity which is why it no longer looks like a square.
Coal merchants used to chalk up the changing prices of coal on slates outside their offices or struck deals in the local public houses.
As Cardiff became the biggest coal port in the world it was thought necessary to have a building to do this so to the designs of Edwin Seward the Coal Exchange was built between 1883 and 1886.
Following its opening, coal owners, ship owners and their agents met daily on the floor of the trading hall where agreements were made by word of mouth and where the novelty, the telephone was available.
During the peak trading hour of midday to one o clock the floor might have as many as 200 men gesticulating and shouting. It was thought that up to 10,000 people would go in and out of the building each day.
There was much excitement in 1907 when the worlds' first million pound deal was struck at the Exchange. At one time the price of the world's coal was determined here.
Several more opulent banks and offices opened around the square - Baltic House, Ocean Building, Cory's Buildings, Cambrian Buildings, many still standing and featuring fascinating maritime motifs.
But with Cardiff so overwhelmingly concerned with a single product its reliance on coal made the Bute docks highly vulnerable to any downturn in the demand for it, a fact which became painfully apparent in the inter-war years.
With the end of the war the docks went into further decline. The Coal exchange closed in 1958 and coal exports came to an end in 1964.
Still a manificent building, the Coal Exchange was earmarked in 1979 as a future home of the proposed Welsh Assembly, but that plan for devolution was rejected by the Welsh people in a referendum.
The building has most recently been run as a venue for concerts, conferences, festivals and functions.
It was closed in autumn 2007 for redevelopment, but due to the economic downturn the project has been postponed.
As a result, the building was reopened in November 2009 for use as a venue.
your comments
Francesca Carpanini
If it is tastfully redeveloped and maintains its fabulous history and features, then it will become a superb building to add to the regeneration. If the developers forget the history and destroy the architecture for modern contempory minimalism, it will be a great shame and the grade listings authority should get involved, so that developers can't take away original aspects of such a prominent building in Welsh history.
Jason Keogh, Gilfach Goch
It's a beautiful building and it will be a shame to let it go.
Richard Bazley
The appalling history of what should have been a centrepiece of the bay continues. Finally after having been bought by the Development Corporation from the hands of "private" developers who wanted to develop the building in keeping with its past, left to moulder and disintegrate for 10 years whilst they created the waterfront - sold to a private developer who allowed even further disintegration of the fabric and then, lo! a planning permission to dismember the finest Victorian commercial building in Wales and beyond. Shame on the City Council, the dead hand of Welsh bureaucracy and the lack of imagination by our elected representatives on the planning committee.
Alan Trevers, Cardiff
It is in this building that the first £1,000,000 cheque was written.
