A 25 Feet Tall Steel Man stands in the centre of a traffic roundabout at Oakdale, a small Sirhowy Valley town in Wales.
The Sculpture is called 'Chartist Man' sculpted by artist Sebastien Boyesen, and placed in March 2005.
The 25 feet tall Chartist Man is made of thousands of stainless steel flat washers welded together. This was intended to show there is strength in numbers. The washers can clearly be seen in the close up of his right foot shown in the listing gallery.
The Chartist were a group of Welshmen campaigning to get the vote for all Men
On the 4th November 1839 thousands of men marched into Newport opposing the ‘tyranny’ of a Parliament elected by fewer than a tenth of the male population.
Angry at the rejection of the People’s Charter calling for universal male suffrage, secret voting, equal electoral districts, annual Parliaments, salaries for MPs and the removal of the property qualification for MPs, they came armed with sticks, pikes and guns. At the Westgate Hotel, soldiers fired at the crowd and 22 men died, and more than double that number were seriously injured. Three of the leaders, John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones, were convicted of treason and exiled in Tasmania.
This defeat set the Chartist movement back, but the campaign to get the vote for all men continued, spread, & grew, throughout The United Kingdom. Two further unsuccessful petitions in 1842 and 1848 were signed by millions of British people.
Agitation continued and popular pressure led to the extension of the vote to a third of all adult males (1867) and the introduction of secret voting (1872) in Ireland, Scotland, England, & Wales.
In 1918 all British men over 21 gained the right to vote, as did women over 30, but equal voting rights for women were not attained in Britain until 1928.
The information below is shown in more detail on the Source web site :- (
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"The Chartists obtained one and a quarter million signatures and presented the Charter to the House of Commons in 1839, where it was rejected by a vote of 235 to 46. Many of the leaders of the movement, having threatened to call a general strike, were arrested. When demonstrators marched on the prison at Newport, Monmouthshire, demanding the release of their leaders, troops opened fire, killing 24 and wounding 40 more."
Note :- Monmoutheshire as a County no longer exists, the area now has new boundries and is called Gwent.