Newport
Newport is located on the River Usk close to its confluence with the Severn Estuary, 12 miles (19 km) northeast of Cardiff. It is the third largest city in Wales, with a population of 145,700 and an urban population of 306,844. The city forms part of the Cardiff-Newport metropolitan area with a population of 1,097,000.
Newport has been a port since medieval times, when the first Newport Castle was built by the Normans. The town outgrew the earlier Roman town of Caerleon, immediately upstream, and gained its first charter in 1314. It grew significantly in the 19th century, when its port became the focus of coal exports from the eastern valleys of South Wales. Until the rise of Cardiff from the 1850s, Newport was Wales’ largest coal-exporting port. Newport was the site of the last large-scale armed insurrection in Britain, the Newport Rising of 1839 led by the Chartists.
The TSS visited Newport in 1991, our host being Martin Price Thomas, son of our former President Sir Clement Price Thomas (in whose memory we were to hear an eponymous lecture in China in 2007 during our joint visit there with the RCS).
The images above show Newport (Left) and its ‘Steel Wave’ (Right)