White Portland stone civic buildings with domes and colonnades stand around formal gardens, and the Glamorgan Building doubled for the Foreign Office in the Prime Video series Young Sherlock.
What Cathays Park looks like
Wide paved avenues cut through Cathays Park in a formal grid, lined with white Portland stone government buildings set back behind lawns and clipped hedges. City Hall's clock tower rises over the northern end, its four gilded dials visible from several streets away, with a Welsh dragon sculpture crowning the dome beside it.
The faces the gardens with a colonnaded portico under its own dome, flags along the forecourt and fountains on the lawn in front. Farther along King Edward VII Avenue, the and both carry deep columned fronts, the Crown Court's twin domed towers rising above the trees.
faces Museum Avenue with an ornate corner tower and a winged figure at its top, rows of arched windows along a colonnaded ground floor. The nearby has a plainer front, tall ground floor columns and little of the corner tower's carved detail.
sits between the avenues, its lawns broken by a circular colonnaded war memorial and cut with gravel paths under mature trees. The , a 1930s addition in the same white stone, has a plain fluted portico rather than the earlier buildings' carved detail.
A few buildings break that pattern. Cardiff Central Police Station, a 1960s tiered concrete block, stands on the park's southern corner. Cardiff University's Students' Union nearby is glass and steel rather than stone.
Shot in Cathays Park
The National Museum Cardiff has stood in for museum settings across four episodes of Doctor Who and a Sarah Jane Adventures serial. On King Edward VII Avenue, the Glamorgan Building's columned front was dressed as the Foreign Office in London for the Prime Video series Young Sherlock.
Doctor Who
National Museum Cardiff
The museum's colonnaded entrance and galleries have appeared across four Doctor Who episodes, including the TARDIS arriving at a museum in Dalek and a scene inside the International Gallery in Planet of the Dead. The Sarah Jane Adventures used the same gallery for Mona Lisa's Revenge in 2009. Street View
Young Sherlock
The Glamorgan Building
Played the Foreign Office, Whitehall, London
A theft scene and, in the show's third episode, a scene dressed as the Foreign Office in London were both shot at the Glamorgan Building's columned entrance. The building continues to house Cardiff University's School of Social Sciences. Street View
The Glamorgan Building's own Beaux-Arts front, opened the same decade as many Whitehall ministries, was dressed as the Foreign Office for the Prime Video series Young Sherlock. Its columned entrance and pale stone pass for a Whitehall government building without alteration. Keep modern rooftop aerials and satellite dishes out of frame, and avoid a wide shot that takes in the University's own campus signage nearby. Try searching Whitehall government building now.
Donegall Square in Belfast, Northern Ireland
Belfast City Hall opened two years after Cardiff's, in the same Portland stone Baroque style, though its dome sits centrally over the building rather than on a corner tower. The combination of a civic dome, colonnaded wings and a square of formal lawns is still close to City Hall's own setting in Cathays Park. A full building shot gives the difference away, since Belfast's dome sits central and higher than Cardiff's corner tower. Tighter framing on the columned wings holds up better. Try searching Portland stone civic dome now.
The Temple of Peace's plain fluted columns and stripped classical front share the limestone colonnades and restrained detailing of the 1930s federal office buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue. Both were built as government architecture in roughly the same decade. The road markings and mailboxes are British rather than American, and would need dressing. Federal Triangle's own buildings also run much longer and taller than the Temple of Peace's single block. Try searching 1930s federal limestone building now.
