W.A. Bakers Foundry

Hello, I'm Goff Morgan, and I was at one point Newport's official Town Poet from 1997 until the year 2000. And now I say I'm Newport Town Poet Emeritus, which means retired but able to keep the title.

Newport, it's a rambunctious town, there's something still 'of the frontier' about Newport. It's very much still a boom, a growing town, even though it always goes up and down and it gets depressed and it gets better and it gets depressed again. So when I came to write about it I wrote most about my experience of it, a lot of autobiographical stuff came out, a celebration of naffness.

There are two things about Newport. There's Newport as it actually is and Newport as it appears to be. And I think sometimes the Newport as it appears to be is not really very fair. Most town centres aren't terribly palatable at the weekend, but there's this rest of the week in Newport. People say 'Oh it's an ugly town.' No it isn't - try and look above the shop fronts. I remember being told that by my headmaster when I was thirteen - look above the shop fronts. So I came to realize about this town, it's architecturally becoming incredibly important because it's got a virtually intact Victorian centre, and in terms of history as well - I mean the continuity of the town is a thousand odd years or more. No, more than that, possibly one thousand one hundred years. It's a microcosm really of what happened in the nineteenth century to places.

It's about the overlay of history with the present. Newport is somehow not perceived of as having a history, or having any sort of, but this idea that the bones of the past are still there. They're sort of poking into the present.