Town in Blaenau Gwent, Wales
Ebbw Vale
Ebbw Vale turned a smoking steelworks site into a garden festival in 1992, and it was the last one Britain ever held.
Key information
- County
- Blaenau Gwent
- Nation
- Wales
- Known for
- Steelmaking, Aneurin Bevan, the 1992 National Garden Festival
- Famous people
- Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot
- Football clubs
- Ebbw Vale AFC (defunct; folded in 1998)
About Ebbw Vale
The garden that grew on a steelworks
In 1992 the last National Garden Festival in Britain opened in Ebbw Vale. It was the fifth in the series, after Liverpool, Stoke, Glasgow and Gateshead. The site was the old steelworks. Where furnaces and rolling mills had stood, visitors wandered through show gardens, art and landscaped slopes. The idea was to prove that a heavy-industry valley could reinvent itself. Parts of the site became Festival Park, and the festival is still the town's best-known modern moment.
A valley built on iron
Ebbw Vale's story starts around 1790, when an ironworks was set up beside the Ebbw Fawr river. The valley had everything the trade needed: coal, ironstone and limestone, all within a short haul. The village grew into a town around its furnaces. In time it became a steel town, with the works as the main employer for generations of families. In 1938 a modern strip mill opened here, one of the most advanced plants of its kind in Britain. For a while, Ebbw Vale was the sort of place the country looked to for the future of steel.
Bevan, Foot and the politics of the valley
Few towns have been represented by two such famous figures in a row. Aneurin Bevan was the MP for Ebbw Vale from 1929 until 1960. As Health Minister in the post-war Labour government, he drove through the creation of the National Health Service in 1948. When Bevan died, Michael Foot took over the seat and held it until 1992. Foot went on to lead the Labour Party. The Aneurin Bevan Memorial Stones stand on the mountainside above Tredegar, near Dukestown, looking over the landscape that shaped his politics. The two men helped make Ebbw Vale a byword for Labour tradition and the Welsh left.
When the steel stopped
The works had a hard history. The Depression of the early 1930s hit the town badly, and the plant's fortunes rose and fell through the decades. Steelmaking ended in 1978, and tinplate production continued until the works closed in 2002. That left a huge brownfield site at the heart of the town. The Garden Festival was part of the response, and the land has since been reused for housing, leisure and new buildings. The town's recent story is one of rebuilding on its own industrial footprint.
Steelmen on the pitch
Ebbw Vale RFC, founded in 1879, are known as the Steelmen, a name that says exactly where the town's pride comes from. Rugby here has always been a working community's game, played on Saturday afternoons and followed by the whole valley. Football had its moment too. Ebbw Vale AFC played in the League of Wales during the 1990s before folding in 1998. The National Eisteddfod has visited twice, in 1958 and again in 2010. The Welsh language festival's two stops show that Ebbw Vale is as much a cultural town as an industrial one.
Trains, hills and the way in
Ebbw Vale spent years without a passenger rail link. Services returned in 2008 with trains to Cardiff, and a second station, Ebbw Vale Town, opened in 2015. Regular direct services to Newport were added in 2024. Around the town, the hills climb steeply on every side. The head of the valley is a place of open mountainside, reservoirs and long views, a sharp contrast with the industrial scene that once filled the bottom of the valley. That mix of old works, new regeneration and wild hills is why Ebbw Vale tells the story of the South Wales valleys better than almost anywhere.