BARKERS
Kurtis & Kane Barker
From ‘Barker Baggies’ to coffee, cocktails and Steak Frites: four decades of reinvention in Castle Arcade
In the early 1980s, the Barker family opened a clothing shop in Cardiff's Castle Arcade, selling fashions that would become familiar to a generation of shoppers, including the unmistakable ‘Barker Baggies’.
More than 40 years later, the family is still there. But where customers once came to browse clothes rails, they're now just as likely to be ordering coffee, cocktails, steak frites or a pint of Guinness.
It's an extraordinary transformation that has seen one of Cardiff's long-established retail families reinvent itself as a major independent hospitality operator, while remaining rooted in the same historic arcade.
For brothers Kurtis and Kane Barker, Castle Arcade is more than a business address. It's where their grandfather established a clothing shop in the early 1980s, in the premises now occupied by Rum & Fizz, and where their father later joined the family business.
At its height, the clothing company operated around nine stores across the South Wales Valleys. But as fashions and shopping habits changed, the business gradually contracted, leaving the Castle Arcade shop as one of the last remaining outposts.
“At one point, all that was left of the Barker name was that one shop in Castle Arcade,” Kane explains. “But from that one space, we've managed to build everything back up and expand all over again.”
The move into hospitality wasn't the result of a grand business plan. In fact, it began almost by accident. When the clothing shop expanded into a neighbouring unit, the family found space to introduce a small coffee counter, fulfilling a long-held ambition of their father.
It was a modest beginning: a panini machine, a counter and just 13 seats. But as demand for fashion declined, customers increasingly embraced the coffee shop, and the balance of the business began to shift.
“Slowly, as fashion started dying down, people wanted the coffee shop vibe,” Kurtis recalls. “Coffee Barker started with literally a panini machine, 13 seats and a counter – and that's how we got to Coffee Barker as it is now.”
“The arcade saved us,” is how the brothers describe that period of reinvention.
Today, the family operates five distinct hospitality venues within Castle Arcade: Coffee Barker, Rum & Fizz, Gin & Juice, Maison de Boeuf and Barker's Tavern.
Together, they employ around 125 people in the arcade alone. It's a remarkable scale for a family business whose Cardiff operation was once reduced to a single clothing shop. And while the venues share an owner, each has its own personality, offering customers different reasons to visit throughout the day and evening.
The family is keen to preserve those individual identities, rather than presenting the businesses as one large operation. Behind the scenes, however, their proximity creates something quite special.
“It's almost like one big family,” Kurtis explains. “Everyone knows each other.”
Staff regularly move between venues to help one another, borrowing supplies when needed and making use of the network of underground passages and cellars that connect parts of the historic arcade. Kurtis describes it as a small village, where the businesses operate independently but benefit from being so closely connected.
The buildings themselves have also played an important role in shaping the family's approach.
Castle Arcade's ornate architecture, unusual three-level layout and elaborate curves provide a dramatic setting, but fitting out the individual units is not always straightforward.
Behind the glamorous shopfronts, the spaces can be surprisingly plain, requiring considerable work to create interiors that feel as characterful as the arcade outside.
For Kurtis and Kane, the aim has always been to make each venue feel as though it belongs within its historic surroundings.
Visitors sometimes assume the interiors were inherited intact, unaware of how much effort has gone into creating them; other details have genuinely survived from the family's earlier retail days.
In Rum & Fizz, marks and holes in the walls have occasionally inspired imaginative explanations from passing tour guides. Their actual origins are rather less mysterious: decades of fixtures and fittings installed to display clothing. The family has deliberately retained some of those marks as reminders of the building's history.
But while they're passionate about preserving the character of Castle Arcade, the Barkers have never been afraid to change their own plans.
Barker's Tavern, for example, was originally conceived as a rotisserie chicken shop.
That idea changed after the brothers' father spent time working in Dublin, where he developed an unexpected enthusiasm for traditional Irish pubs.
He returned to Cardiff with a new ambition, and the planned chicken shop became a pub instead. It's a story that sums up the family's approach to business: ideas evolve, opportunities appear and sometimes the best decisions are the ones nobody originally intended to make.
Over the decades, the brothers have watched Castle Arcade evolve around them, too. They remember different shopfronts, changing colour schemes and the transformation of Cardiff's city centre as shopping and hospitality have shifted between different areas.
Today, the arcade attracts tourists, office workers, regular customers and people visiting the city for its castle, stadium and events. Its architecture has even made it a popular backdrop for newlyweds having their wedding photographs taken.
But for the brothers, the arcades offer something more important than an attractive setting. They believe the independent businesses within them are a major part of what makes Cardiff memorable.
“I think people come for the castle and the stadium,” Kane says. “But they fall in love with Cardiff for the arcades and the independents that are in them.”
It's a sentiment shaped by a family history that stretches across more than four decades of changing fashions, customers and business ideas.
The brothers also hope that a new generation of independent traders will see the arcades as somewhere to begin their own journeys.
With smaller, characterful units and a strong tradition of independent enterprise, they believe these historic spaces can offer aspiring business owners an opportunity to take their first steps.
After all, their own family's story shows just how much can grow from a single shop.
From Barker Baggies to coffee, cocktails and pubs, the business has changed almost beyond recognition since the early 1980s. But the place at the heart of it remains the same.
And for Kurtis and Kane, the ambition is to continue building on that legacy. After more than 40 years in Castle Arcade, they're hoping for another 40 to come.