WHAT’S it about?
Like a fatberg-clogged sewer at the bottom of the Valleys, Newport is easily Wales’s most dismally shit-flecked city and was voted ‘most likely to be built on top of an open Hellmouth’.
It is situated close to the English border and Cardiff to give false hope to those making a desperate attempt to escape it before being dragged back and imprisoned in this cell of mud, concrete and white cider urine forever.
Anyone who knows the city knows the sensation of reading a vile story of depraved subhuman scrotes in the news, eg a pet monkey being offered cocaine and flushed down the loo, and knowing by the third paragraph that this vile carnival freakshow whirling around life’s toilet bowl could only happen in Newport.
Any good points?
A surprising amount of connections to music history: the Stone Roses borrowed the city’s logo for Second Coming, which sucked shit. Kurt Cobain proposed to Courtney Love after being beaten up by locals at TJs and ended up killing himself. Joe Strummer dug graves there.
Wonderful landscape?
Fuck no. Flat with ditches filled with water by the side of every road. There’s a castle but unlike the majesty of other Welsh castles, you walk through this one to get to fucking Sainsbury’s. Take a moment to enjoy the shopping trolleys stuck in the estuary mud. The country’s shittest castle? Yes.
Hang out at…
Wetherspoons, indie pub The Murenger, the other Wetherspoons. There are other pubs, but best not if you want to live. Which after 48 hours you won’t. Even getting drunk there is dangerous. You might wake up in a flat in Bettws so obese you need a mobility scooter even though you’re only 29.
Where to buy?
Newport in Shropshire, Newport in Pembrokeshire or Newport, Rhode Island. Anywhere but this fucking place.
From the streets:
Cerys, aged 45: “We had a reality show from here once, that Bouncers. Everyone was drunk scum and all the stars lost their jobs. That’s Newport.”
Dave, aged 29: “You can go on the Transporter Bridge if you want but it basically takes you from the prostitutes-and-heroin bit of the city to deserted swampland with howling dogs. Because this shithole is so fucked.”