A look back at Gwent in the noughties

THE IT people had been working as feverishly as codebreakers at Bletchley Park on the eve of D-Day battling a menace at least as great as that posed by Nazi hordes.

On January 1, 2000 we all became Seventh Day Adventists, waiting for the end of the world.

But the Millennium Bug to use an Americanism, had bugged out.

It was business as usual as our screens filled up with the torrent of e-mail which by the turn of the millennium was rivalling what was sneeringly referred to as 'snail-mail' – sooo last year.

There had been some debate about when the 21st century actually began.

The LG facory closes 19th August 2006

Purists maintained that 2000 was the last day of the old millennium and the 21st century should be dated from 2001.

Logic was on their side but popular sentiment was not. The 20th century had been so unrelentingly awful that nobody wanted it to go on for another year.

In Gwent as elsewhere the process of managed decline was well under way.

Economists who look good when things are going well were predicting the end of manufacturing and the growth of the information society.

Calzaghe defeats Jeff Lacey to unify the world super-middleweight titles 6th March 2006

Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, sold off most of the nation's gold reserves believing as was fashionable to do that the day of solid, actual things was past and that all in future could be managed by the movement of electrons within microchips.

As a result steel production at the Llanwern works reduced as the cost of foreign imports fell.

By the end of the decade the integrated works incorporating 1960s cutting edge (literally) technology was for the most part a desert of brick rubble.

Friar's walk scheme fails 10th June 2009

War, a theme which had been thoroughly explored in the 20th century continued to exercise its grim appeal in the Noughties with two Gulf Wars and Afghanistan.

In Iraq, commanders and politicians had to wrestle with the same problem as had Napoleon in Russia in 1812 - it was okay invading a place, the problem was what to do when you got there.

Iraq ended in ignominious defeat for the British Army which because by this time politician spin had been almost perfected was presented as a 'phased withdrawal'.

Massive blaze destroys Marlborough Road, Newport 8th August 2007

The first decade of the 20th century was marked by dubious military adventure (in South Africa) and a vague feeling that decadence and decline were setting in.

By the 2000s there were plenty of people around to tell us that all considered, things hadn't changed all that much.

So many people were living to the age of 100 that the Queen was rumoured to be on the point of ending centenarial telegrams although by 2000 telegrams had been snuffed out of existence by the e-mail.

A big difference between the Noughties and the Edwardian period of the preceding century was that the 2000s weren't particularly naughty.

Violent, squalid and depraved perhaps, but without the delicious curl of bohemianism.

The 1890s and 1900s saw Oscar Wilde and the young Picasso.

Crash kills four Ebbw Vale teenage girls 11th November 2006

All Britain could manage was the drug-addled Pete Doherty and the bleakly untalented Tracy Emin.

A couple of local bands did not too badly though and the Manic Street Preachers had their moment in the headlines.

Culturally, for a city living in the shade of the capital Newport did all right.

The events leading up to the opening of the Riverfront arts centre were bizarre.

Archaeologists sifting the mud for incidental treasures where the arts centre to be built came across a large baulk of timber which Newport Council insisted was 'only part of an old jetty'.

When it was leaked to a member of the press (ahem) that the 'old jetty' was in fact an vessel - possibly an ancient and historical one - a spectacular reversal began to happen.

Now the Riverfront is a run-of-the-mill arts centre no better nor worse than any city of 140,000 has the right to expect whilst the Newport Ship is a world treasure.

We did very well for bridges.

In Newport a new bridge hurried traffic over the Southern Distributor Road taking the wear and tear off the Transporter Bridge which celebrated its centenary and was pretty worn and torn.

A footbridge across the Usk next to buildings designed to house the arts and design faculty of the university (by the 2000s the establishment that had not even made polytechnic status had promoted itself) was completed.

Newportonians affectionately call it call it the Giant Hair-pin.

As the decade approached its autumnal phase the colours of the financial boom began to fade and by 2009 the ground was covered by a leaf-litter of closed businesses and unemployment.

But an appreciable gain had been made in terms of roads and housing while the city centre with its Victorian architecture which survived because the Germans didn't think us worth saturation bombing, survived.

As white elephants went, LG represented a whole herd.

Huge amounts of public money were sucked into the project which was going to guarantee Gwent jobs for decades. By the 2000s the place was an echoing vault, the only sounds the scuttling of mice and the nightwatchman's tread.

Gwent as a whole has done not badly at all for writers.

W H Davies the tramp poet was born in Pill, Newport and is still insufficiently honoured as is Arthur Machen.

Lesllie Thomas, a Maesglas boy, is in 2010 still turning in very readable best-sellers and although Alexander Cordell died in 1997 Blaenavon in particular has made something of his literary heritage.

The Cordell Literary Festival grew, albeit modestly, throughout the decade.

The Welsh Assembly, possibly because most people now realise that it was founded on electoral fraud, remains unliked throughout the county.

Most would admit though, that apart from the usual pratfalls Gwent's four councils (five if you count Caerphilly) have discharged their duties well.

Wales and Newport in particular have done well out of public sector jobs .

How this will play out in the teens with a government of whatever stripe determined to cut public spending is presently behind the veil of time future.

Gwent's triumph in the first decade of the new millennium is to remain surprising like the Gwent of 1910.

Look at Commercial Street in Newport, Hanbury Road and Trosnant Street in Pontypool, Most of Chepstow, Tredegar and a score of Valleys towns and you will see very much what your great-grandfather saw.

Many things are better than they were in the last century and a few are worse.

A surprising amount though, hasn't changed, or at least not changed beyond all recognition which is not bad.

If we were on X-Factor we'd get a '7'.