Just last month, Cardiff held the second of its series of Blackweir music concerts, a now annual event staged in Bute Park, home to the compact city’s 1,000-year-old castle.

The festival – mixing Cardiff’s rich built heritage with its clear vision of where it wants the city to be and a hefty dose of fun – is emblematic of the city’s direction and ambition. The first year the Welsh capital put it on, Blackweir counted Alanis Morissette and Stevie Wonder among the line-up. Daniel Lewis, design director at architect HLM – which has an office in Hodge House, a beautifully refurbished Victorian office in the shadow of the Principality Stadium – says: “Blackweir is absolutely the best venue ever. It’s outside; it’s like going to a festival, but right in the city. It’s just brilliant.”

The success of Blackweir, which drew nightly crowds of 35,000 to the north of the city through June and July, is an example of how the city has worked to reinvent itself since facing the reality of industrial decline in the 1970s and 1980s. The city’s economic strategy is based around becoming a destination and a host for national and international events that draw in young and talented people. A place so great visitors won’t want to leave.

Central to that vision has been making Cardiff as a physical place as good as it possibly can be – with a vision of a dense, compact walkable city driven by the council’s planning strategy. This all builds on a physical reinvention led at the turn of the century by a clutch of world-class buildings: the Millennium Stadium (now the Principality); the Millennium Centre and the Senedd.

A tightly packed city with a wealth of historic buildings and natural beauty a stone’s throw away, it has a lot to work with. “You’ve got that green space. You’ve got good transport links. You’ve got that maritime link into the bay. You’ve got all those buildings that were built up in the industrial history,” says Justin Moore, regional director for Wales at consultant Gleeds. “So, you’ve got a feeling, a vibe, around Cardiff which is quite unique.”

Now, with Cardiff on the cusp of the delivery of a new metro scheme which may finally properly link up the bay with the city centre, plus delivery of a host of other big schemes in the pipeline, the Welsh capital appears to be once again a city on the rise.