‘Don’t call us turkeys voting for Christmas’: Welsh area ‘showered with EU cash’ still thinks Brexit is a good idea

Blaenau Gwent was once ‘the crucible that drove the industrial revolution’. Now its people feel ‘desperate’ – and unrepentant about voting for Brexit. Adam Lusher meets them

‘Shiny ornaments in the town centre’: The EU-funded ‘Heart of the Furnace’ sculpture, with the signs for BrightHouse and Poundstretcher behind (Adam Lusher)

This was the crucible that drove the industrial revolution, once.

It was a valley blessed with mineral wealth in abundance, enough for men to dig out 2 million tons of coal a year.

The steelworks in Ebbw Vale could lay claim to being the biggest in Europe: 11,000 people working there in the 1960s, amid “the noise from the tinplate lines, the smell of acid used to clean steel coils, the sight of a hot ingot, as bright as the sun, being reduced to a thin steel slab”.