South Wales Valleys

North Wales, different, Wrexham, it is all about football, but it's a far smaller population.

Whereas the South Wales Valleys, this melted part of different... communities and regional cultures all together rugby comes out of it as being the main game but this match that Cardiff City play and win is a real chance for Wales to get on over England almost and a lot of the people in Cardiff in particular see this as a chance to really show off their Welshness for the first time to a much bigger audience.

Rugby's obviously got its own fans, but nowhere near the same level as football, especially the Africa final, which is up there as one of the biggest institutions in all of British culture, full stop.

The newspaper articles are really interesting on this football, as you mentioned already before, but also because what they mentioned about the Welsh element as well, the Welsh just that goes on.

That is Fred Keenor, the captain.

And this guy epitomized Welshness culture and Valleys culture.

He's a man from the South Wales Valleys.

He was chain-smoking.

Well, I think my father made more money from dealing in the shops in our village than he did in selling meat.

So I think when it came to my education and university choices, it was a very poor village in the Welsh Valleys.

And my father understood property better than he probably understood meat to a certain extent and said, you need to go to university and the best course is Cambridge or Reading.

He understood.

If I would like your listener to remember my university for one thing, that would be we bring hope to the valleys.

Everybody knows about the Welsh Valleys.

This university has been serving the valleys as the only university in the Welsh Valleys.

It has a history in mining, coal mining.

So it used to be a mining school nearly 150 years ago, and then through evolution and marches and changes and different governance changes now since 2013, known as University of South Wales.

We are quite a comprehensive university.

We offer quite a wide variety of science, technology, health, policing, business, performing arts courses and creative courses split between three campuses.

I am today in Treforest in Pontypridd, right at the mouth of the Welsh Valleys.

So he was drawing from his experience And therefore perhaps...

A gay man from the Welsh Valleys too.

Well, exactly.

But therefore maybe I should believe that that is the more authentic, you know, where I said, God, you know, that was so full of tension and stress.

A fan claimed to have seen Edwards at the Newport bus station on February 5.

A taxi driver later reported picking up a man resembling Edwards and driving him around the South Wales Valleys.

The passenger reportedly asked to be let out at a specific spot near Blackwood, which was Richie Edwards' hometown.

Some friends noted that in the weeks prior to his disappearance, Edwards had been withdrawing large sums of money, roughly 200 pounds a day, which totaled nearly 2,800 pounds by the time he vanished.

So I make pigments from local rocks.

So I go up into the Welsh Valleys where we've got lots of ochre-

Yeah

... because there's lots of iron in the soil, um, and make natural pigments and also natural pigments from plants.

George Bennett, who, uh, uh, signed for the club in the 1930s, became a great standoff pl- uh, played for the, the Wales rugby league team in 1935.

Roy Francis was signed as a young kid, a young, uh, from the South Wales Valleys by Wigan in the 1930s.

So there was, there was a tradition in Wigan, and there was a tradition in rugby league of, of, um, not having a color bar for Black players, which existed in most other sports.

Uh, and rugby league players were playing international rugby league long before Black players were playing international football, uh, in numbers anyway.

So I did my, uh, after finishing the Elvis project, I was commissioned to do a residency in Blaenau Gwent.

Blaenau Gwent is a county in the South Wales Valleys, um, which has, like, one of the highest rates of poverty in the Wales.

And they looked for a photographer in residence to do some kind of work, um, with, alongside social housing.

Um, so it was like a, it was about coming in, delivering workshops, taking pictures with, of the community.

So I moved there with my partner, Sebastian, um, in Abertillery, a very small town, uh, in the middle of the Wa- of Blaenau Gwent.

And I was looking at different projects, what, what I could do, and it, it felt very, um, hard for me at the first to take pictures there because I'm not sure if you're familiar, but the South Wales Valleys have been, you know, very much photographed.

Uh, it's been so many people, you know.

Like, even Bruce Davidson went to the Valleys, took pictures there.