Present
Today there are no steelworks or mines left in or around the town, though Ebbw Vale is still recognised for its innovation and contribution to the development of Britain as an industrial nation. This includes the world's first steel rail, rolled at Ebbw Vale in 1857, and the rails for the Stockton and Darlington Railway were also manufactured at Ebbw Vale.
Unemployment in Ebbw Vale is among the highest rates in the United Kingdom, largely the result of the decline of the mining and steel industries.
In 2003 work began on demolishing the long-standing steelworks, and currently around one to two miles of the valley stands empty awaiting development.
Ebbw Vale hosted the National Eisteddfod in 1958 and again in 2010 . The Welsh language was dominant in the area until the last quarter of the 19th century and remnants of the language (Welsh hymns and pockets of Welsh being spoken in nearby Rhymney) persisted into the 1970s. The National Eisteddfod returned to Ebbw Vale in 2010.
Aneurin Bevan, the "father" of the National Health Service, represented Ebbw Vale as a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) in Parliament from the 1929 general election. When he died in 1960, he was succeeded as MP by Michael Foot. The seat is now called Blaenau Gwent.
The Ebbw Vale conurbation today is a product of areas which grew during the Industrial Revolution in the South Wales coalfield and the South Wales Valleys as a result of the iron industry, local ironworks or have developed as a result of distinct housing areas to serve local industry with workers, they include: Ebbw Vale, Rassau, Garnlydan, Hill Top, Briery Hill, Glyncoed, Willowtown, Glanyrafon, Cwm, Newtown, Victoria, Tyllwyn, Waunlwyd and Ebbw Vale itself. In particular Beaufort and Victoria were the two original iron producing areas.
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Famous quotes containing the word present:
“Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to lay a train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“I can’t earn my own living. I could never make anything turn into money. It’s like making fires. A careful assortment of paper, shavings, faggots and kindling nicely tipped with pitch will never light for me. I have never been present when a cigarette butt, extinct, thrown into a damp and isolated spot, started a conflagration in the California woods.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)
“The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)