The mystery of the Nonpareil Market

This decorative stone plaque, bearing the inscription ‘The Nonpareil Market 1889’, now sits very incongruously atop an archway over a path into an estate of modern, rather ugly flats and houses in James Street, Cardiff Bay. Prior to its relocation, it was displayed at the top of an imposing stone building that stood very close by, on the corner of James and Louisa Streets, which, in 1889, contained the business premises of butcher Frederick Ward, and Solomon Andrews, an entrepreneur who operated a grocery store at this location but had his finger in a great many other pies. 

I am not the first person to have wondered about the origin of the Nonpareil Market name, nor the first to have spent time researching to try to find an answer, and I will probably not be the last. As part of an excellent series of blogs exploring the buildings shown in the superb artworks of Cardiff artist Mary Traynor, David Webb, a volunteer at Glamorgan Archives, produced the blog Nonpareil Market, James Street, Cardiff, published in January 2018. Despite his extensive research, Webb was unable to find an answer to the Nonpareil Market mystery, but his blog is certainly worth a read, and it includes an image of Traynor’s lovely watercolour of the building to which the plaque was once attached. You can also view a photograph of the bricked-up building, taken in 1985 prior to its demolition, on the Tiger Bay and the World Collection website. 

In 2014, in a guest post on the blog We Are Cardiff, contributor Jeremy Rees also wondered about the Nonpareil name, admitting that

All I can glean is that Nonpareil was the name of a sugar plantation in Guyana, South America – I know that many Guyanans settled in Tiger Bay and the Docks so that may be a clue, but as to where the stone came from and why it’s there, that’s still a mystery.

The mystery of where the stone came from was solved by David Webb but not the name. As I like a good challenge, I too have tried to discover the origin of the Nonpareil Market name. A search of the Welsh Newspapers that have been digitised and made available online on the National Library of Wales website revealed no information on the name Nonpareil Market. However, the word nonpareil appears in 3011 entries (reduced to 2637 if I selected the English language option), a total that rather surprised me. Even more surprising were the contexts in which the word was used:

• there were references to the collisions and wrecks of both a sailing ship and a steamship of that name;
• a fabric known as ‘Nonpareil’ velveteen was advertised as ‘the richest, softest and most becoming fabric ever produced’;
• the boxer who was middle-weight champion of America in 1889, ‘Dempsey, the Nonpareil’, who had been beaten in a prize fight and so was no longer the ‘unequalled’;
• a racehorse competing in the Zetland Plate at York, named, presumably, by an optimistic owner;
• an apple, grown on the North Aston Hall estate, which was for sale in 1909: ‘it was in the grounds that the “Nonpareil” apple was introduced into this country from Normandy in 1593 and called “North Aston apple”, or “Folk’s apple”.

It seems usage of the adjective nonpareil was much more common in the 19th and early 20th centuries than it is today, when we would be more likely to use adjectives like unequalled, unrivalled, or unsurpassed. And that, in turn, made me wonder whether the name Nonpareil Market was simply a boast by the entrepreneur Solomon Andrews that his ‘grocery store’ was, in fact, a market for goods and produce that was unequalled by any other in the Cardiff area. The truth is we shall probably never know, but I have passed an enjoyable stormy afternoon trying to find out.