‘It was always the way to vote Labour here’: party’s proud Welsh heartland makes a clean break of it

A mural in Tredegar celebrates its influence on the founding of the NHS, partly through the role of the local-born health minister Aneurin Bevan. Photograph: Francesca Jones/The Guardian

Reminders of the Labour movement’s roots are inescapable in Tredegar, south Wales: murals pay tribute to party giants Aneurin Bevan and Neil Kinnock, both of whom were born here.

The Workmen’s Hall Library is long gone, replaced by a car park, but the Cambrian Inn, which hosted early trade unions and Chartist groups, survives. The Tredegar Medical Aid Society, which Bevan used as a model for the NHS, was across the road; today it is a heritage centre paying tribute to the public health pioneers and the area’s coal-mining and steel-making past.