Volume Five - The Age of Decline & Crass Stupidity - The legacy and recent developments . . .

A local on-line newspaper, The Penarth Daily News [092] posted the following editorial in July 2013 entitled “The rotting rubbish beneath Penarth marina's Plymouth Park that's costing us a fortune”

“A digger gets to work on Plymouth Park (the Penarth Marina “Green”) near the Oystercatcher Pub. Engineers have now moved in to the Penarth Marina “Green” to dig up the grassed area known as Plymouth Park) and begin the next stage of a four-month programme of underground pipe renewal… for which we’re all paying.

Many residents at the “Tesco” end of Penarth Marina may well be unaware that their homes actually stand on the quaysides of what was once the western end of Penarth Docks and are all built around what later became a municipal rubbish dump. The beautiful hand-laid stone archways of Penarth Dock have been buried under tons of municipal rubbish and will probably never be seen again.

The docks were once twice as long as the Penarth Quays yacht marina now is and extended up to and beyond where the Tesco supermarket now stands. However in one of the daftest decisions ever made in the history of local authority planning it was decided to cut the dock in two, build a “bund” across the middle, and use the western (upper) half of the docks - with its exquisite Victorian stonework – as a municipal rubbish dump.

A huge net was installed on massive arches across the dock to keep seagulls away whilst the dumping went on and soon the dock was full of rubbish. No one actually knows what’s in there – (this was before the days of recycling and segregated waste) but what is known is that it gives off gas – lots of it. There’s not only gas coming out of the buried refuse but liquid – or leachate – and this chemical cocktail is also having to be extracted and pumped into a lagoon before being admitted into the sewerage system.

In 1987 the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation was set up to redevelop Cardiff’s docklands and took ownership of Penarth Dock from the local authority.