Why the south Wales town that forged the NHS now points to its future

Tredegar, the birthplace of Aneurin Bevan, offers a microcosm of the health and social care problems facing the nation

Growing up in Tredegar in the 1960s, Jackie Rowlands vividly remembers the long benches in the surgery waiting room. Patients would move along the bench until it was their turn to see the doctor: "They were absolutely shining, so people just slid along because they were polished all the time. When you were a child, they were wonderful. You might be at the surgery at nine o'clock in the morning and not be seen until 11 o'clock, and if the doctor was called out to an emergency nobody complained." She recalls a spirit of camaraderie: "Women used to knit in the surgery. And you had conversations - you got to know people along the bench."

Coal mining had brought jobs and relative prosperity to the town: Rowlands remembers Tredegar as a thriving community, with two cinemas, a "massive library", the Workmen's Hall, which held weekly dances, and a snooker hall. But the industry took its toll on health: pneumoconiosis, a lung ailment caused by coal dust, was widespread.