Mike Packwood

________________________________________ I've driven past the West Lee apartment building in Cardiff hundreds of times without stopping to take a look. Now that I have, I'm not sure whether I think its a perfect example of its time and place, or just plain hideous. Its difficult to know where the architect was coming from on this one - not necessarily because of its ugliness - being built from unflattering dark brown brick doesn't help -  but simply because its difficult to see properly from any direction. Hemmed into quite a small plot between Victorian housing, a filling station and a Unite Union office block you cant get far enough away to see it as it was probably intended to be seen, and for me, for that reason alone, it just doesn't work.

Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse At the time of its construction this was the largest brick built building in the world. Now it's close to dereliction with only a Sunday market occupying the ground floor. Apparently the reason it hasn't been re-developed is due to the small size of its rooms and low ceilings. Designed to keep tobacco moist, its rooms are small, with very thick walls, which makes redevelopment prohibitively expensive. Seeing it slip further and further into decay is a great shame as it remains an epic building - harking back to the heyday of Liverpool as a port

Slight departure from the norm here - but I seem to have accumulated quite a collection of flower pics, so here they are. Don't ask me what any of them are though! Mostly from.... The Mortella Gardens on the island of Ischia Duffryn Gardens in the Vale of Glamorgan St Davids in West Wales Tenerife             

A few pictures of Cardiff's magnificent Millennium stadium - taken from the Penarth side of the bay, plus a couple from the game vs Argentina in 2014. From an architectural point of view - if you're interested in why one end of the stadium doesn't look finished, the answer is at the bottom of the page. Pic left .The seats on the left here - at what is now one end of the ground  rest on the remaining part of the old stadium, which in turn still supports the Arms Park stadium roof next door. The Old National Stadium This is what the old National stadium used to look like. It used to run East/West and the new one has been turned 90 degrees and now faces North/South. You can see in the top picture that the old stadium supported the roof of the Arms Park, (home of Cardiff Blues). The reason the new stadium isn't finished as a complete bowl is that one end of the new one still supports the roof of the Arms Park - which in turn means th