Mrs Stradling – now 81 – was born and raised in Grangetown but moved to Penarth when she married her late husband, Cardiff University history professor Robert Stradling.
She has “fond memories” of growing up in Cardiff, adding: “We felt it had everything in the 1950s, because no city had very much really. I’ve always loved Cardiff, because it’s home.”
While she remembers the capital city status being endowed, she doesn’t recall much immediate change for young people like her.
The 1950s, she said, saw the end of tram transport in Cardiff, replaced by trolleybuses, while the average weekly wage for a working man was about £9.
A steam train to Barry was a popular day out in her childhood, but by 1955 holidays slightly further afield had begun.
“My family first did so in 1956 and Cornwall seemed very exotic to us, as the sea was blue, not grey like in Barry, and the beaches had lots of shellfish and wonderful coloured shells to collect.
“It was just like stepping into an Enid Blyton story for a Cardiff child.”
She said she felt life was “happier and more innocent in those days” and that not all of the changes of the past 70 years had been for the better.
But, she added, while the “main streets were always lovely”, the rest of the city centre used to be “very run down” and milestones such as the opening of the St David’s Centre in 1981 and the development of Cardiff Bay in 1987 had been a “huge injection of life and vitality”, making it a “much more vibrant” place.