Culture
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The South Wales Valleys became a symbol of the whole of Wales for many foreign people and people in the rest of the United Kingdom. The valleys do, however, contain a large proportion of the Welsh population and remain an important centre of Welsh culture, despite the growing dominance of Cardiff. The UK parliament's first Labour Party MP, Keir Hardie was elected from the area and the Valleys remain a stronghold of Labour Party power. Rugby union is very popular and pitches can be seen along the valley floors. Football is also popular in the valleys, as in the rest of the UK. The area was overwhelmingly Welsh-speaking at the end of the nineteenth century, but today, English is most commonly the everyday language.
The geographical shape of the valleys have their effect on culture. Many roads stretch along valleys connecting the different settlements in the valley. Consequently the different towns in a valley are more closely associated with each other than they are with towns in the neighbouring valley, even when the towns in the neighbouring valley are closer on the map. The Heads of the Valleys road, the A465 road, is significant due to its connection of valleys with each other, and there are hopes that the upgrading of this road to dual carriageway will improve the economic performance of the region as the road becomes the main thoroughfare to South West Wales from the West Midlands.
Read more about this topic: South Wales Valleys
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)