Days out: Go shopping in Wales

Vegan condoms, violins, kinky boots, classical music, kilts, crystals, herbal tinctures, hip-hop, buttons and bagels ... Those who despair of the homogenisation of the high street and its insipid uniformity will relish the gutsy little shops colonising Cardiff's Victorian and Edwardian arcades.

Vegan condoms, violins, kinky boots, classical music, kilts, crystals, herbal tinctures, hip-hop, buttons and bagels ... Those who despair of the homogenisation of the high street and its insipid uniformity will relish the gutsy little shops colonising Cardiff's Victorian and Edwardian arcades.

Defiantly flying the flag of diversity are stores such as I, Claudius, stuffed to the eaves with retro clobber, and Rebel Rebel, where you can have the outposts of your anatomy skewered with rings and trinkets. The Bear Shop is a tobacco emporium awash with the requisite paraphernalia of the discerning smoker, and possibly the last place in the cosmos to welcome pipe puffers. In the Organic Juice Bar, you can thumb through a leaflet on Hawaiian Huna Therapy (release the negative, reveal the positive), while your immune system-boosting citrus combo swirls around the juicer.

Given the capriciously eclectic nature of the arcades – Castle, High Street, David Morgan, Royal and Wyndham – it should come as no surprise to find an upmarket jewellery shop replete with luxuriant sofas (prospective purchasers need to lean on the buzzer to gain admittance) sitting next door to a sprawling outfit selling the ultimate in ethno-tat. Nor should it be a surprise to find a classical music shop and a hip-hop joint cheek by jowl. Nor to exit the cheese shop and immediately come face to face with Johnnies, Cardiff's condom store, purveyor of the aforementioned vegan condoms, as well as culinary treats including penis-shaped pasta (increases in size when cooked).

Johnnies lives in the arrestingly pretty Castle Arcade where a glass-domed roof and enormous mirrors bounce light around, and on a sunny day it is suffused with a giddying luminosity. Other residents include the Organic Juice Bar, Claire Grove Buttons (a store dedicated to every conceivable permutation of button imaginable), a clutch of trendy clothes shops, two small eateries: Café Minuet and the Celtic Cauldron.

Troutmark Books is where first editions of Iris Murdoch's The Good Apprentice, William S Burroughs's A Book of Dreams and Douglas Adams's So long, and Thanks for all the Fish grace the window. There's a balconied upper level, too, where Welsh Jazz, Friends of the Earth and dance music label Plastic Raygun are berthed, and you can find a violin maker and old-fashioned tailor to boot. Don't be tempted to peer in to determine what Plastic Raygun employees get up to during office hours though. A sign in the window states: "Please move along. There's nothing to see here."

When New Yorker Harriet Davies married a Welshman and set up home in Cardiff she decided to narrow the cultural gulch between the brimming US sarnie and the bantamweight UK equivalent by setting up the New York Deli. Davies launched her enterprise in the High Street Arcade 12 years ago, bringing salt beef bagels, rye bread and hoagies to a nation only just emerging from bridge rolls topped with tinned salmon. In the post-sundried tomato era, such things are not so radical, of course.

On a full stomach you could head for Eccentrix at the mouth of the same arcade. It is a shoe fetishist's paradise. Check out the shiny thigh-high numbers in red and black with heels as tall as stilts or the über platforms, close relatives of the ones Naomi Campbell famously fell off. Eccentrix also stocks orthodox footwear suitable for those with less adventurous sartorial inclinations.

And at the Wyndham Arcade, currently undergoing reconstructive surgery, there's body piercing specialist Rebel Rebel, where you can have your most intimate parts perforated for £30.