Location from The First Law by Joe Abercrombie
An industrial city in Midderland where the workers' revolution began — the factory floor of the Union, where exploitation finally produced the explosion everyone should have seen coming.
Valbeck is where the Age of Madness begins — the industrial city where workers' grievances boiled over into the Breaker revolution. The conditions are Dickensian: long hours, dangerous work, subsistence wages, and an aristocracy that considers the workers' complaints impertinent. Savine dan Glokta is in Valbeck when the uprising starts, and her experience of giving birth during a workers' revolt while trapped in a workhouse is the Age of Madness trilogy's defining image — the privileged brought low by the system they built.
An industrial city of factories, smokestacks, and worker tenements. The air is thick with smoke and the streets are grimy. The wealth produced here flows to Adua; the poverty stays.
Also known as: Valbeck