Cathays Park, Cardiff, is home to Cardiff University. A place where students are encouraged to think differently about themselves and the world. The geographies of Cathays Park itself can play a role in helping us all think differently: about the world, our place in it, and even about the nature of places themselves. These pages explores one particular way to these ends: by keeping in reel!

Cathays Park is a place of education and civil society, but it is also a place of the creative industries. It is a location whose architectures, external spaces, and interiors are regularly used as sets for television and film productions. These pages encourage us to account for how these activities influence what this place is, and in turn challenge us to think about what any place is.

So these pages map Cathays Park and the film and TV productions set here. You can find out what we did here. From these maps, the project raises questions about how the cultural connects to us, and to places; to be precise, it explores how the real connects to the reel.

“Spaces can be real and imagined…. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated and transformed through artistic and literary practice. [These maps] can tell [our] stories and unfold histories” (hooks, 1989: 23).

“‘[Its] an Alternative Atlas,’ whispered Professor Cyril Sidewinder, ‘a collection of maps of imaginary and real places… a gorgeous and entire and complete geography of worlds that no one has ever seen before…’” (Cowell, 2023).