‘Here’s the thing about Ebbw Vale,’ begins 68-year-old sheep farmer Charlotte, in a pair of bright yellow galoshes: ‘You can smell it before you see it.’
It’s just gone one o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in the small Welsh town, 30 miles north of Cardiff, and the queue outside Greggs stretches beyond the door. Laughter spills out of the Wetherspoons opposite, and a gaggle of school-aged children cycle past holding cheeseburgers in their mouths, one with a McDonald’s paper bag over his head.
‘It’s deep fried this and greasy that,’ continues Charlotte, who is in town picking up supplies. ‘It stinks. Show this town a piece of fruit and they’d think the aliens had landed.’
Indeed, walk around Ebbw Vale – home to more than 20,000 people – and it doesn’t take long to work out why the former steelworks has been dubbed ‘Britain’s fattest town’. The statistics are damning.
In the Welsh county borough of Blaenau Gwent – where Ebbw Vale is the largest town – 78 per cent of people are overweight with 37 per cent of those classified as obese, meaning they have a BMI of over 30. Women here have one of the lowest life expectancies (79.2) of anywhere in Britain and men (75.8) the second lowest in Wales, something widely attributed to weight-related comorbidities. But is any of this really a surprise when 73 per cent of restaurants are junk food outlets and Ebbw Vale alone boasts 15 kebab joints?
In a desperate bid to arrest the problem, Blaenau Gwent council last month announced plans to ban advertisements of ultra-processed food within their jurisdiction, such as on bus shelters and billboards. And it isn’t the first time the council has felt compelled to step in. Last September the Labour-run authority prevented a barber shop from being converted into yet another fast-food outlet, citing concerns for the health of residents.
‘By taking this forward,’ declared councillor Helen Cunningham of the mooted ad-ban, ‘it shows we are serious about addressing the health inequalities that so badly affect our borough.’
Last week, the Daily Mail visited Ebbw Vale to discover just how this town got its unsavoury label as Britain’s fattest, and to find out what difference an ad-ban would make in a borough where obesity is baked in and school-aged children know the way to McDonald’s like migrating swallows.
There are 87 fast food takeaways in Blaenau Gwent – a borough just 42 square miles in size – as well as 17 mobile catering businesses serving up roadside burgers and baps, taking the total number of junk food outlets to more than 100, a number that is likely even higher with some larger chains such as McDonald’s not officially registered as takeaways but as restaurants.
The double-fronted Greggs is the most popular spot for greasy grub here. ‘If you’re after our busiest times,’ declares the exhausted lady in a hairnet behind the counter: ‘It’s all day, every day.’
‘It starts with the breakfast rush,’ continues her colleague. ‘Then from 10am until 2pm it’s constant really. Especially when the school kids come for lunch. The most popular items are the sausage rolls and the corned beef bakes, though usually they’ll get some potato wedges as well.’
A Greggs sausage roll comes out at 428 calories, the corned beef bake at 417 and wedges at 279, meaning this meal – at a cost of £6.45 – totals over 1,100 calories, well over half the recommended daily allowance for school-age children.
Other junk food outlets on the high street include a fish and chip shop, a flurry of Chinese takeaways and Cowgirls Burgers, which offers everything from £4.50 cheesecakes to a £10 combo meal including a bacon cheeseburger, skin-on fries, onion rings and a drink.
When the Daily Mail asked whether there were any healthier options in town, one local advised that the Family Kebab House near the multi-storey car park offers shredded lettuce with their doner meat.
Opposite two billboards, advertising Greggs and McDonald’s respectively, bookstore proprietor Sharron Andrews, 40, admits such adverts can be a distraction.
‘I did see the McDonald’s advert today and think, “yes, I could do with one”,’ Sharron says. ‘And I wouldn’t have thought it otherwise. But banning the adverts isn’t going to stop kids seeing it over social media.’
Would YOU back a ban on junk food adverts in YOUR town?
Indeed, there is a heavy scepticism across the town over the council’s proposals. ‘It’s a bit late for that,’ sighs Sue from inside her clothing shop where she’s seen a sharp increase in the demand for extra-large garments.
‘You can take the adverts away from the town, but they’ll still be on TV all the time,’ adds a Mrs Turner, 58, who works in a furniture store on the high street where particularly large customers can now buy specially reinforced beds capable of taking the strain of a 38-stone human. As if to stress the point, Mrs Turner then sings the iconic jingle associated with the food delivery company Just Eat.
‘The problem is you have two parents working now just to keep the family afloat,’ she says, expressing concern over the cost of fresh food. ‘And that means there’s no one at home with even the time to cook. So, the kids just go out and buy junk.’
Outside, a grossly overweight boy, no more than 12 and dressed in a tracksuit, carries not one but two large drinks from McDonald’s.
‘Ever heard of Google?’ jokes Jay Lynch, owner of Pins and Things needlecraft, when I ask about the advertising ban. ‘If people can’t be bothered to cook then they’ll search it out. If you’re going to eat this stuff, then you’re going to eat it. But the problem is that only the fast-food places can afford the rents. There was a shop a couple of years ago up for £17,500 a year.’
Rents like this are steep in a region where people have little spending power. In the town of Ebbw Vale, one in 20 people are claiming unemployment handouts of some kind with one in 30 claiming benefits for ‘anxiety’. In the Blaenau Gwent county borough more widely, over a quarter of the population between the ages of 16 and 64 are economically inactive, according to government data from 2024. Clearly, like so many parts of the Welsh Valleys, the region has struggled to recover from the closure of coal pits and steelworks – in this case, the shutdown in 2002 of the Ebbw Vale steelworks, which put more than 700 people out of work.
For Jay, obesity isn’t the problem: ‘I’ve never been a “skinny mini” and as a child I would have been categorised as obese,’ she continues. ‘But now, as a mother, I can say that yes, some children might have a bit of weight on them but that’s there to help them with a sudden growth spurt. I don’t agree with high fat, sugar and salty foods all the time. But the Government shouldn’t control what we eat. Let us make our own choices.’
Sally, who is 17st and in her 30s, is more positive about the ad ban, saying: ‘If the council can help by not shoving pictures of burgers in my face then that’s something.’
Sally – which is not her real name – admits to the Daily Mail that she hasn’t been able to come into town recently, despite living nearby.
She blames the two-week closure of the cable car that takes people the short journey from the train station down a 180ft hill.
‘I don’t drive and without the cable car I can’t walk into town. It’s at times like these I’m glad I’m losing weight.’
There is a certain irony to the fact Ebbw Vale has some of the best sporting facilities in the Welsh Valleys. Along with a professional rugby club, multiple games pitches and a cricket ground, the town also boasts a state-of-the-art £15million sports centre complete with 25 metre swimming pool, fitness suite, dance hall and five-a-side football fields.
The complex opened in November 2013, ostensibly to improve health and fitness in the town. Except, when the Daily Mail visited last week, it found the on-site cafe full of customers tucking into a menu that includes chip rolls, pizza, chicken burgers, sausage rolls, nuggets, curry sauce and gravy. Notices advertised free access to the gym for 16 to 25-year-olds on Thursday mornings as well as 30-minute sessions offering nutritional advice to new mothers.
Club secretary and junior co-ordinator at Ebbw Vale Cricket Club, Nick Pepper, admits the town does have an issue with getting young people out of the chippy and into exercise.
‘We used to go out and play football, cricket, rugby late into the evenings,’ declares the former military serviceman. ‘You don’t get that now. The kids, they’re pampered. Unless it’s organised for them, they don’t go out and play. Perhaps it’s all this computer gaming nonsense.’
‘The local schools offer a little sport, but not a lot,’ he continues. ‘And it’s too easy for them to drop out of PE with a sick note. It’s a mark of a society that has gone soft. I remember forgetting my PE socks in the Royal Navy. We had these little white socks for marching; I forgot them and so they painted them on to my skin and we got on with it!’
‘I don’t think there’s a single root cause,’ Nick says, ‘but ours is a society of shortcuts now. My mother always cooked, my wife cooks. But maybe some parents don’t have time any more.’
In the whole of Ebbw Vale, there is just one green grocers, ‘Fresh ‘n’ Fruity’, where the proprietor Stuart confesses he’s ‘fighting a losing battle’ when it comes to getting people to cook and eat more healthily, despite offering two large punnets of strawberries for just £3 and a bag of oranges for a pound.
The council even gave out vouchers to local families last year entitling them to free fruit and veg from the store. ‘We had families coming in who had never eaten strawberries or raspberries,’ Stuart continued, but he fears that when the voucher scheme ends later this year, the new customers will disappear.
‘You see children walking past in the morning, going to school, and the first thing they’re doing is going into Greggs. It’s dispiriting.’
And yet, perhaps, there is a glimmer of hope in Ebbw Vale. In the south corner of the town, the Daily Mail met Leah and Coady, a young couple in their early 20s who have taken on one of 32 council-owned allotments where they have begun growing their own vegetables. Amazingly, all the allotment holders – who pay £25 a year for a 20-by-5-metre plot – donate one row of vegetables each harvest to the local food bank.
‘I was struggling with drinking and drugs,’ confesses Leah. ‘So, I came out here to get a different outlook on life. Eating badly really contributes to mental health.’
‘We were surprised that there were free plots,’ adds Coady. ‘We’ve started tomatoes, broccoli, peas and other basic veg. It’s amazing. We were never taught in school how to eat healthy. We were just given food. I even remember making chocolate pizzas.’
Since Coady and Leah joined, allotment chairman Mark Williams, 58, reveals there is now a growing waiting list with interest in vegetables on the rise.
There was once a time when the mining men of these Welsh Valleys dug their hands into the ground to keep the lights on. Nowadays, they’re doing so in a desperate bid to keep the weight off.
Local Labour MP Nick Smith told the Daily Mail that banning junk food ads was a ‘good start’ before bemoaning that ‘cheap, high-calorie, ultra-processed foods and convenient takeaways are more prevalent than ever.’
The sentiment was echoed by Cancer Research UK’s public affairs manager in Wales, Simon Scheeres, who told the Daily Mail: ‘Restrictions on local junk food advertising in Wales could help to make it easier for more people to keep a healthy weight. It’s important that this is part of a wider approach, including measures to ensure that everyone who needs it can access effective weight-management support.’
Regardless, it’s clear that no one in Blaenau Gwent really believes a restriction on junk food advertising will address the region’s ballooning waistlines. One solution, however, may lie in the free prescription of fat-loss jab Wegovy on the NHS, something announced earlier this month and that has of course proved hugely successful around the world. However, as one local put it to the Daily Mail: ‘Of course the fat jabs would be welcome here, but they may need to bring a bigger needle.’
