In the latest installment of Travel Hot Takes, award-winning travel writer Ben Aitken writes a love letter to an ‘imperfectly perfect’ city in Wales.
I’m not being funny, right, but Newport is a very decent city.
Not everyone shares this opinion, of course. Indeed, when I said live on radio that I would rather have a weekend in Newport than New York, the presenter almost terminated the broadcast to check I was alright.
Newport lies just a whisker over the Welsh-English border, ten miles from Cardiff and twenty from Bristol. It was a boom town in the 1800s, when it made money exporting coal and iron that had been mined in the valleys of South Wales.
I first visited about two years ago, when conducting research for a book about unsung cities. Fresh off the train, I took some local advice and headed to a café called Rogue Fox.
When I asked the young lady behind the counter what there was to do in Newport, she said the passport office was popular. Not a good start.
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I wandered into the centre, where many of the buildings are quirky and Victorian, neither straightforwardly classic nor obviously Gothic.
Outside Westgate Hotel, I paused to consider a key moment in British history. On this spot in 1839, a bunch of downtrodden workers gave voice to longstanding peeves. They were called the chartists, and their goal was pretty simple: to give more people a say on the nature of their fate.
John Frost was the main man in Newport. On that fateful day in 1839, Frost had wanted a peaceful march on Westgate Hotel, where a number of prisoners were being held for calling for reform.
However, a bunch of professional troublemakers had other ideas. They whipped things up royally, and so doing gave the army an excuse to fire on the crowd. Twenty were killed. Frost and his fellow leaders were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. Tidy.
Further along the high street is the recently restored indoor market. They’ve done a decent job of it, and I wasn’t alone in thinking so – the place was bustling.
Of the outlets, I developed a soft spot for Rogue Welsh Cakes, whose cakes were the best I’ve munched on.
Heading south on Commercial Street, I stopped to consider a sculpture that paid homage to the poet W.H. Davies, a local lad most famous for a couplet imploring the reader, amid the hurly-burly of life, to stop and stare now and again. (‘What is this life if full of care…’)
Born in Newport in 1871, WH Davies grew up in a pub, was charged with shoplifting at the age of thirteen, then lost a leg attempting to jump a ride on a freight train.
It was at this point that he moved to London, where he did long stints in the dosshouse, composing poems in his head to avoid the mockery of his cellmate.
By hook or by crook, Davies went on to become a genuinely popular poet. A literary celebrity even. They called him The Supertramp.
Crossing the river now, I paused to admire Newport’s infamous Transporter Bridge.
The bridge somehow manages to incorporate a gondola, which is a nice instance of globalisation if there ever was one – bit of Venice in South Wales, don’t mind if we do.
It’s one of only a handful of transporter bridges in the world, which might imply that they’re not ever so practical.
On the east side of the river, I reached my destination – the local velodrome, which is basically a big bowl for cycling.
While the velodrome is named after Geraint Thomas, a Welsh cyclist who won the Tour de France, you don’t have to be in mint condition to get in the saddle: three times a week you can do a one-hour taster session for about twenty quid.
I was issued all the gear, delivered a briefing, and then sent out to do laps. After five minutes it felt like I’d been pedalling for an hour.
My calves started to spasm, and then my glutes got wind of my calves and followed suit. Soon they were all at it. Even my face muscles were freaking out.
Let me say this: track cycling isn’t feel-good at first. It is painful and scary at first and then great afterwards, once you’ve survived.
What track cycling is at first and then afterwards as well is mindful. You have to concentrate at all times, meaning you can’t think of pet concerns, or dwell on perceived imperfections, like not being able to load a dishwasher proficiently. I’m all for it.
After watching a game of rugby at Rodney Parade (nice pies), I walked along the Chepstow Road to my accommodation. Celtic Manor is an award-winning resort that hosted the 2010 Ryder Cup (a big deal in the golf world) and the 2014 NATO summit (a big deal in the world).
I spent most of the next day in a jacuzzi (when in Rome), then headed back into town for dinner at an Italian called Vittorio’s.
There’s a fairly big Italian community in Newport (which is to say a fairly big community of Italians, rather than a community of fairly big Italians), the descendants of miners who came across from Puglia and Tuscany in the nineteenth century to work in the Welsh valleys.
Vittorio’s is run by third-generation Italian ex-pats, and is top class. Everything about my meal was spot on, not least the meatballs.
My final stop was Le Pub, a community-minded boozer at the top of the high street, whose big front terrace was heaving with public-spirited folk.
A gig had just finished, and now there was dancing and a DJ in the pub’s bit on the side. Like Newport itself, the vibe was warm, quirky, open, and a tiny bit unhinged.
I spent too long in Le Pub, I don’t mind saying, chatting with the locals, having a dance, slagging off Bristol, and quietly coming to the conclusion that, despite its imperfections, Newport might just be the best city in Wales.
Ben Aitken is the author of Metro‘s regular Travel series, B-List Britain, and Shitty Breaks: A Celebration of Unsung Cities.
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