  We consider a family of cylindrical spacetimes endowed with angular momentum
that are solutions to the vacuum Einstein equations outside the symmetry axis.
This family was recently obtained by performing a complete gauge fixing adapted
to cylindrical symmetry. In the present work, we find boundary conditions that
ensure that the metric arising from this gauge fixing is well defined and that
the resulting reduced system has a consistent Hamiltonian dynamics. These
boundary conditions must be imposed both on the symmetry axis and in the region
far from the axis at spacelike infinity. Employing such conditions, we
determine the asymptotic behaviour of the metric close to and far from the
axis. In each of these regions, the approximate metric describes a conical
geometry with a time dislocation. In particular, around the symmetry axis the
effect of the singularity consists in inducing a constant deficit angle and a
timelike helical structure. Based on these results and on the fact that the
degrees of freedom in our family of metrics coincide with those of cylindrical
vacuum gravity, we argue that the analysed set of spacetimes represent
cylindrical gravitational waves surrounding a spinning cosmic string. For any
of these spacetimes, a prediction of our analysis is that the wave content
increases the deficit angle at spatial infinity with respect to that detected
around the axis.
