Across Newport's skyline are some fairly obvious signs of a city on the up. There's the 15-storey luxury Mercure Hotel which opened earlier this year in Chartist Tower, its tallest building. Across the road is a sparkling new indoor market which regularly draws a crowd even on weekdays. Further outside is the life-sized dragon perched alongside the state-of-the art ICC Wales, now a familiar site for anyone who's been stuck on the M4 even semi-regularly.
Earlier this year Newport was named the fastest-growing city in Wales. The 2021 Census revealed a 9.5% increase in the city’s population from 145,736 to 159,600 people, with Cardiff, the Vale of Glamorgan and Bridgend also seeing significant rises.
For a city with one of the best transport links as far as London, paired with soaring property prices in Cardiff and Bristol and the scrapping of the Severn Bridge tolls in 2019, it’s no surprise that Newport is seeing more and more people set up their lives there. Perhaps buoyed by its new popularity, developers appear to have taken stock too; alongside some major developments finally opening their doors, there have also been major housing projects at the former Llanwern steelworks, the Mon Bank estate and Lysacht village, among others.
