Ebbw Vale

A Valley Town Remade

A ten-and-a-half-metre clock sculpture stands in the town centre, made by Smith of Derby to a 2009 design by Marianne Forrest. Ebbw Vale sits at the head of the valley cut by the Ebbw Fawr, with the Brecon Beacons National Park beginning immediately to the north, so open moorland is a short climb from the last streets. Everything here rests on land that used to hold something larger.

The town-centre pub is The Picture House, a Wetherspoon on Market Street. The building went up in 1970 as a supermarket, but the name recalls the Astoria picture house that stood on the site from 1940. The house history is blunt about how the place came to exist: "the town of Ebbw Vale owes its existence to the iron, steel and coal industries."

Culture, Sport and Open Ground

For a stay, the practical draws are the leisure centre with its 33-metre pool, the Beaufort Theatre — the largest in Blaenau Gwent, running music and drama — and Eugene Cross Park, home of the Ebbw Vale rugby club, the Steelmen, whose roots go back to the 1890s. Glamorgan used to play county cricket there until the early 2000s.

Walking is the reason to come. The Brecon Beacons sit directly north for open-hill days, and the Aneurin Bevan Memorial Stones stand on the hillside near Tredegar to the west, a set of stones commemorating the town's most famous MP. Closer in, Festival Park keeps the fishing lake, owl sanctuary, woodlands and the "Mother Earth" sculpture that survive from the 1992 National Garden Festival — the last such festival held in the UK, which drew more than two million visitors across five months. A few miles off, Parc Bryn Bach spreads 340 acres of reclaimed mining land around a 26-acre lake, with kayaking, paddleboarding, open-water swimming and mountain biking.

Steelworks Scale and Survival

The scale of what stood here is hard to picture now. The Ebbw Vale steelworks was the largest in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, and employed around 14,500 people in the 1960s. Steel made here went into the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and rails for the Stockton and Darlington Railway were rolled here in 1829. The last works closed in July 2002, and the site has since become "The Works" — wetlands, a learning campus, housing and offices where the furnaces were. The General Offices of 1913–15 survive as Gwent Archives; Queen Elizabeth II opened the restored building in 2012.

Bevan, Foot and the NHS

Aneurin Bevan was the Labour MP here from 1929 until his death in 1960, and the main architect of the National Health Service. He took 81 per cent of the vote in his final election. Michael Foot, later Labour leader, succeeded him. The town's hospital, Ysbyty Aneurin Bevan, opened in 2010 as what was described as "Wales' first all-individual-bed hospital."

The Cableway to The Works

An inclined elevator runs between The Works and the town centre — fifty-seven metres of track, a twenty-four-metre lift, a free twenty-second ride, weekdays only. You get in, the valley drops away, and it lets you out where the steel used to leave.