Blackwood

Screens, Stages and the High Street

The Maxime is a five-screen cinema on the high street, purpose-built in 1938 and later a bingo hall, with its original foyer decoration still in place. A few doors along stands the Blackwood Miners' Institute, paid for from 1925 by the miners of Oakdale Colliery at threepence a week, extended by two floors within a decade and reopened in 1992 as a venue that has since hosted Jasper Carrott, Ken Dodd and Welsh National Opera. Some of the Manic Street Preachers' earliest gigs happened here. The four of them formed the band in 1986 at Oakdale Comprehensive, which they all attended, and a mural of James Dean Bradfield, Richey Edwards, Sean Moore and Nicky Wire by the street artist Paul Shepherd went up in the town in April 2024.

The high street itself follows the exact line of the old Sirhowy Railway, which carried passengers from 1865 until 1960. The station site is now a KFC, and no rail runs into Blackwood now; buses go from the bus station to Ystrad Mynach for trains on the Rhymney Line. The street remains the shopping and market centre for the wider Sirhowy Valley, running up to St Margaret's, the Anglican parish church at the top — the one established church in a town whose life ran to chapels instead. A 1904 Methodist chapel houses the Blackwood Little Theatre.

From Maesrudded to the Valley

For a meal and a bed, Maes Manor Hotel sits in the former manor house of Maesrudded, once home to the Lord Lieutenant of Monmouthshire.

The walking starts more or less where the streets end. The Sirhowy Valley Walk follows the river south through woodland toward Ynysddu and the site of Nine Mile Point Colliery, past the remains of former pits and railways. To cross the valley you can take the Chartist Bridge, a cable-stayed span 230 metres long and 30 metres above the valley floor, opened in 2005 and hung with a statue made of thousands of brass rings. Follow the river the other way and you reach Gelligroes Mill, a watermill of around 1625. In 1912 an amateur wireless enthusiast there, Artie Moore, picked up the Titanic's distress signals on a receiver he had built himself; he later went to work for Marconi.

Chartism and Nearby Excursions

Those brass rings are for the Chartists, and Blackwood was one of their strongholds. John Frost, Zephaniah Williams — a Blackwood man — and William Jones "met regularly at the Coach and Horses public house in Blackwood" to plan the 1839 march on Newport. South Wales was the only region to rise; the leaders were sentenced to death and transported to Tasmania instead. The Coach and Horses was demolished in 1958. Blackwood itself had been built barely a generation before, laid out from the early 1800s by the colliery owner John Hodder Moggridge as a model village.

Further afield lie Cwmcarn Forest Drive with its mountain-biking trails, and Caerphilly Castle, the largest in Wales, with its leaning tower and its moat.

A National Anthem from Blackwood

The best of Blackwood, though, belongs to two men in the weaving trade. Evan James was a weaver and wool merchant; with his son James he set down the words and tune of "Hen Wlad fy Nhadau," the Welsh national anthem, in 1856. It came out of an ordinary working household in a town not fifty years old.