Cardiff Cardiff ( Welsh : Caerdydd ( TV : " Boom Town " ) ) , originally known as St James , was the capital and largest city of Wales . A spacetime rift was located near Roald Dahl Plass and Torchwood Three were located there , also near the Plass . History . Founding of the city . In 27 AD , the city of Cardiff was founded . Jack Harkness , the leader of Torchwood Three , had travelled back to that time period at the insistence of his brother Gray . Gray and his unwilling accomplice John Hart buried him . The immortal Jack remained underground until 1901 . ( TV : " Exit Wounds " ) St James . In the 15th century , Cardiff was a small parish called St James . Some of the earliest depictions of the Grim Reaper originated from this small community , especially from wood carvings dating back to 1479 , when Duroc walked the Earth . When the townspeople heard about the Black Death , they built a large wall around their land . Sadly , this did not save the life of a little girl named Faith . According to legend , the town ' s priest brought her back to life using a gauntlet , but Faith brought Duroc with her . The entity needed to kill 13 people in order to gain a permanent hold on the Earth , but Faith managed to stop it at 12 . ( TV : " Dead Man Walking " ) 19th century . Over the 19th century , St James expanded into a city . At some point , it was renamed Cardiff . ( TV : " Greeks Bearing Gifts " , " Dead Man Walking " ) On Christmas Eve , 1869 , Charles Dickens ' reading of " A Christmas Carol " in the Taliesin Lodge was interrupted by a Gelth possessing the deceased Mrs Peace . Later that evening , Gwyneth made a bridge through the Rift to allow the Gelth to come through and take over human corpses . Rather than inhabiting a few bodies , the Gelth , numbering in the billions , wished to wipe out all of humanity . Gwyneth lit the gas - filled crypt with a match , trapping the Gelth . ( TV : " The Unquiet Dead " ) When escaping from Satellite Five in 200100 to search for the Doctor , Captain Jack Harkness landed in 1869 using his Vortex Manipulator , which subsequently broke . ( TV : " Utopia " ) Torchwood Cardiff , a branch of the Torchwood Institute later called Torchwood Three , was established here , with Jack joining around the turn of the 20th century . ( TV : " Fragments " ) 20th century . Torchwood Cardiff continued to exist . In 1901 , the Jack Harkness that was buried in 27 A . D . was discovered by his associates . As a past version of Jack was already working for Torchwood , he demanded to be put inside a cryo - chamber for the next century to avoid crossing his own timestream . ( TV : " Exit Wounds " ) In 1904 , the Palisades Theatre was opened . ( TV : " From Out of the Rain " ) During World War II , refugees from the Blitz in London travelled through here , changing trains at Cardiff Station . Like London , Cardiff was bombed during the war . ( TV : " Ghost Machine " ) Dr . Charles Quinn was killed in one such air raid . ( TV : " To the Last Man " ) 21st century . 2000s . On 5 March 2005 , Cardiff city centre was briefly " brought to its knees " during the Auton invasion of Earth ( AUDIO : " One Rule " ) which was brought about by the Nestene Consciousness animating plastic using the London Eye as a transmitter before it was defeated by the Ninth Doctor . ( TV : " Rose " ) The Lord Mayor of Cardiff , Roy Llewellyn , was murder ed by a local councillor named Barry Jackson at about this time . Jackson , who desired the position of Mayor for himself , both for personal gain and acting on the orders of the Committee , used the invasion , announced to the public as a ' terrorist attack ' , to cover his act up among the casualties . ( AUDIO : " One Rule " ) Jackson proceeded to use an alien device that controlled an unidentified blue , monstrous creature to murder his rivals for the position of Mayor . Over the three weeks until 26 March 2005 , the creature murdered five local councillors in a spate of beheadings on Jackson ' s orders . Despite the intervention of Yvonne Hartman on that night in attempting to stop the creature , it proceeded to murder Ross Bevan , Julie Jones and finally Helen Evans , leaving Jackson unopposed for the position of Mayor . Hartman had worked out Jackson ' s plot and confronted him at his apartment , threatening to kill him for murdering innocent people and using alien technology to create scenarios that endangered the country . However , as she needed a spy in an official position to keep an eye on Torchwood Three and the Committee , she decided to let Jackson remain alive on the condition that he work for her . As a result , Jackson became Mayor of Cardiff . ( AUDIO : " One Rule " ) Blon Fel - Fotch Passameer - Day Slitheen , under her guise of Margaret Blaine , was elected as Lord Mayor of Cardiff following her escape from the destruction of 10 Downing Street . She planned to demolish Cardiff Castle and to construct the " Blaidd Drwg " ( English : Bad Wolf ) nuclear power station . She planned on using a tribophysical waveform macrokinetic extrapolator as a pan - dimensional surfboard to escape the solar system after Earth ' s destruction . ( TV : " Boom Town " ) Circa September 2006 , the Ninth Doctor , Rose Tyler and Jack Harkness ( who from his timeline had not yet joined Torchwood ) , travelled to Cardiff to refuel the Doctor ' s TARDIS and to meet up with Mickey Smith . The group discovered this plot . The rift partially opened , causing an earthquake . ( TV : " Boom Town " ) Jack once said to Trine - E and Zu - Zana that he ' d bought a pair of jeans from a Top Shop store in Cardiff . ( TV : " Bad Wolf " ) By this time , human s living in Cardiff had started to notice and take advantage of the alien presence on their world . Illicit merchants for alien artefacts traded in the city and profited off them . These included the " Ghost Machine " , which had fallen through the Rift . ( TV : " Ghost Machine " ) An underground " fight club " where the alien Weevil s fought humans also briefly existed . ( TV : " Combat " ) Not knowing exactly how to use it , part of Torchwood Three team used the Rift Manipulator in order to rescue two of their number out of the past . ( TV : " Captain Jack Harkness " ) The resulting disturbance caused disruptions in time to occur all over Earth , especially in Cardiff . Then , persuaded by Bilis Manger , Torchwood Three used the Rift Manipulator to repair the damage , but also released Abaddon , a demon ic being which killed countless of people throughout the city . ( TV : " End of Days " ) Days later , the Tenth Doctor and Martha stopped in Cardiff to refuel , whereupon Jack Harkness , having just left Torchwood Three , hitched a ride on his ship , ( TV : " Utopia " ) returning to Torchwood some time later having changed his mind . ( TV : " Last of the Time Lords " , TV : " Kiss Kiss , Bang Bang " ) In 2008 , St Teilo ' s Hospital started being demolished . As a result of this , time shifts between 1918 and 2008 started occurring . Tommy Brockless , with the help of Torchwood Three travelled back in time to " stitch " the shifts and stop 1918 and 2008 from colliding with one another . ( TV : " To the Last Man " ) When Owen Harper was brought back to a state of undeath with the resurrection gauntlet , he brought out the return of Duroc at St Helen ' s Hospital . Duroc was thwarted once again before he could reach 13 victims . ( TV : " Dead Man Walking " ) Later , John Hart , under control from Gray set off explosions in key locations across Cardiff and releases an army of Weevils into the open causing maximum panic and terror . Torchwood Three cleaned this up , preventing the nuclear power station from going into meltdown , but losing Owen and Toshiko Sato in the process . Jack Harkness went back in time to be buried beneath Cardiff before its construction , but was later discovered inside the Torchwood cryo - chamber vaults . ( TV : " Exit Wounds " ) In 2013 , the Eleventh Doctor visited Cardiff with Rory Williams to refuel the TARDIS using the Rift . They were captured by Cybermen . ( COMIC : " The Doctor and the Nurse " ) Geography . Grangetown was a location in Cardiff . ( TV : " " ) Cardiff Bay . Roald Dahl Plass , under which Torchwood Three was situated , was a public plaza located in Cardiff Bay . Splott . Splott was the suburb of Cardiff in which Sean " Bernie " Harris lived . ( TV : " Ghost Machine " ) Gary used Splott as an example of where Eugene Jones could have potentially met the bidder for his Dogon ' s sixth eye . ( TV : " Random Shoes " ) Skypoint . SkyPoint was a skyscraper being constructed during the 2000s . It was intended to become the tallest building in the city . ( PROSE : " SkyPoint " , AUDIO : " The Conspiracy " )