On the High Street there's a Tudor-fronted pub called Ye Olde Murenger House, named after the medieval official whose job was collecting tolls to keep the town walls in repair. Sam Smith's of Tadcaster restored it in 1983. It's drink-led rather than dining-led, though you can get pork, pies and fish and chips, and CAMRA drinkers have long liked the historic interior.
A few doors along is Tiny Rebel's city-centre bar, the outpost of a brewery two brothers-in-law started in a garage in 2012. Their Welsh-red ale Cwtch — Welsh for cuddle — was named CAMRA's Champion Beer of Britain in 2015, the first Welsh brewery ever to win it.
Newport Market, a cast-iron Victorian food hall reopened in 2022 after a long refurbishment, rings a central seating hall with independent kitchens: birria queso tacos at Bab Haus Mex, Welsh-beef smash burgers at Burger Boyz, souvlaki at Meat and Greek, doughnuts at Who Cult. There has been a market on this spot since 1854.
For sitting down, the Chandlery occupies a former ship-chandler's building near the river, and the Tickled Trout does tapas and small plates in the centre. The Pod overlooks the Usk and serves street food and cocktails from a riverside terrace; the Pen & Wig keeps a garden.
The Usk loops through the city with one of the greatest tidal ranges in the world, which at low tide leaves broad chocolate-brown mudbanks between the banks. It also explains the steel lattice downstream. A normal bridge would have blocked the tall-masted shipping, so the Transporter Bridge, opened in 1906, slung a boom between two towers and hung a gondola from it to ferry cars across — a suspended ferry rather than a road. It was the only working transporter bridge in Britain from 2019 until it closed for repairs in 2025, and is expected back in late 2026.
At the head of Commercial Street stands the Westgate Hotel. In November 1839 around 4,000 Chartists, many of them miners and ironworkers, marched on it under John Frost, a local draper and former mayor, to free arrested comrades held inside. Soldiers fired from within; somewhere between ten and twenty-four were killed. It was the last large-scale armed rebellion on British soil, and the bullet marks are still pointed out on the portico columns.
Five miles up the Usk at Caerleon is Isca, one of only three permanent legionary fortresses in Roman Britain and base of the Second Augustan Legion. You can walk into the amphitheatre — grassed now, the most complete in Britain — for free, and the barracks are the only Roman legionary barracks still visible in Europe. The Priory, in a building that began as a monastery around 1180, does British food with Spanish open-fire cooking on that side of the city.
South-east, the RSPB wetlands spread 438 hectares of reedbed and estuary mud, with flat, buggy-friendly trails and winter starling murmurations. North-west, the Fourteen Locks canal staircase climbs the hillside at Rogerstone. The rebuilt station, the second-busiest in Wales, puts Cardiff fifteen minutes away and Bristol thirty-five.
W. H. Davies, the tramp poet born in the docklands south of here, wrote "What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare." His statue, called Stand and Stare, sits on Commercial Street.