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 Picture House is a Wetherspoon pub on Market Street, in a building built as a supermarket in 1970. Its name recalls the Astoria cinema that stood on the site from 1940. Iron, steel and coal shaped the town around it.

Culture, Sport and Open Ground

Ebbw Vale Sports Centre's 25-metre pool anchors recreation in town. Beaufort Theatre, the largest theatre in Blaenau Gwent, hosts music and drama. Eugene Cross Park is home to Ebbw Vale Rugby Football Club, the Steelmen. Founded in 1879, the club joined the Welsh Rugby Union in the 1890s. Glamorgan played Middlesex at Eugene Cross Park in a NatWest Pro40 League match in 2007.

Walking is a draw here. 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, commemorating the town's most famous MP. Closer in, Festival Park retains a fishing lake, woodland and the Mother Earth sculpture from the 1992 National Garden Festival, the last 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 36-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 Wales' first hospital with all individual beds.

The Cableway to The Works

The Ebbw Vale cableway linked the town centre with the new railway station on the former industrial site at the valley floor, 23 metres below. It closed in April 2023.