CHILDREN and students from across Gwent helped Newport celebrate the 170th anniversary of the Chartist uprising last week, with a series of special drama and singing performances.

Pupils from Malpas Court Primary School performed a Chartist re-enactment at the event in the Newport centre last Thursday, while 60 musical theatre students from Coleg Gwent show cased a production of a "live" British time line.

The students, from the college’s Cross Keys campus, sang, danced, and acted their way through events from the abolition of slavery to the Chartist marches, the suffragette movement and the mining strikes of Margaret Thatcher’s era.

The event, celebrating democracy, was watched by Welsh secretary Peter Hain.