Llandaff is nowadays an urban village within the city of Cardiff, the capital of Wales. Built on a rocky escarpment, and focused on the ancient Cathedral that is set by the water meadows alongside the river Taff, Llandaff retains a distinct sense of identity and community, just two miles from the city centre. [Map (43kb)]
   Llandaff was a pre-Norman Christian site, although all that remains from this early period are the remnants of a pillar cross. Llandaff takes its name from this early "llan" by the Taf(f)— presumably a group of monastic cells within a protecting wall.  The Cathedral, its Victorian spire now visible from most directions, shares with St davids the ancient characteristic of a low-lying, inconspicuous location, probably chosen to be invisible to sea-borne raiders.
    The Normans occupied lowland Glamorgan in the late 11th century, and in 1107 Urban was appointed bishop of their diocese of Llandaff. The early church was rebuilt in 1120 and again ca. 1200. The Bishop's Palace, now a shell, dates from the late 13th century. To the N of the cathedral lay the Archdeacon's Castle.
   Speed's map of 1610 depicts the cathedral complex at the cross roads of N-S and E-W routes, with a green to the NE of their intersection. The surrounding community had a village rather than an urban atmosphere — on the border of the Vale of Glamorgan, Llandaff was for many years a farming community, supplying Merthyr, Cardiff and Bristol from its abundant market gardens.
    By the early 19th century Llandaff was a "fashionable retreat from Cardiff town"; the earliest surviving buildings, apart from the Cathedral complex, are some Georgian dwellings. At the same time as Cardiff grew in the mid Victorian period, the Cathedral and its religious life were restored, and the village renewed and expanded, with, as Newman (The Buildings of Glamorgan) notes, a high proportion of architect designed houses, both for the cathedral clergy and for the wealthy middle classes who chose Llandaff for their suburban homes.
    The Victorian architecture of Llandaff lends it much of its character. Contrasting with the homes of the rich are streets that reflect the more modest domestic scale of the gardeners, cordwainers and stone masons of Victorian Llandaff: Spencer's Row, for example, off Bridge Street, with its typical mid 19th-century labourers' housing, or Chapel Street and Heol-y-Pavin.