e Other Half: Wrexham Museum and the Museum of Two Halves project

With Wrexham football club and its celebrity owners so often in the news, you might be forgiven for presuming that the plans for a new museum in Wrexham would solely focus on football – but you’d be mistaken. The project is called ‘The Museum of Two Halves’ with good reason: one half is about football and the other is about everything else – well, everything Wrexham, that is!

Until now, visitors to the landmark museum building on Regent Street in Wrexham city centre have only accessed the ground floor with its three galleries. The ‘Museum of Two Halves’ project will change all this: the original central courtyard will be restored but as a double-height atrium introducing the two new museums, with a stairwell and lift to the first floor.

Double doors off the atrium will lead to both the enlarged temporary exhibition space and the new learning suite, earmarked for holiday activities, evening talks, workshops and school sessions. Adjacent to the atrium, another gallery in the old Guardroom will introduce visitors to the building’s history as a militia barracks, a court house and a police station, with links to Wrexham’s mining, sporting and military history.

Upstairs, the new Wrexham Museum will have a suite of galleries, nearly doubling the space devoted to the history of the city and county borough. For the first time there will be permanent room to devote to Wrexham’s industrial heritage and military history, whether that’s the importance of raw materials, the impact of the world wars, the arrival of Wrexham Lager or the sorrows and anger caused by the Gresford Colliery Disaster. Ceramics, clocks, motorbikes and plastic bricks will reveal Wrexham’s links to the wider world, for good and for ill.

The additional space means there will be room to display old favourites like Brymbo Man and still team up with local people to exhibit items from the collection that have been overlooked, and to highlight stories that have been lost or ignored. While each gallery has been given a project name – Beginning, Conflict & Struggle, Daily Life – there’s still scope for the unexpected.

The biggest challenge for any local museum is to cover the variety of local heritage, which is surpassed only by the varied interests and preferences of visitors. Five permanent galleries will make this more possible than now, when there is only one. Each gallery will have its ‘interactives’ to intrigue and challenge children (and at times adults!) alongside films and oral testimony to tell the stories where the objects alone are not enough. But objects will remain the key to unlocking the past: a Christmas pudding bomb, a chapel tea urn, a walking stick from wartime Burma, the sign from outside the Raglan Arms pub or a child’s needlework sampler to suggest but a few. Together they will create a picture of what was and is Wrexham.

DID YOU KNOW?

The new museum is scheduled to open in 2026. We can’t wait!

As with any project of this kind, much will change, yet there will be continuity – the Courtyard Café will return, the forecourt will still be available for events and the trees provide shade on a summer’s day. The architect’s interventions aim to respect the imaginative designs of Thomas Penson, the county surveyor who designed the original militia depot back in 1854. The two court rooms on the first floor are a highlight of the building and will come alive in their role as galleries. Wrexham’s first museum was a week-long ‘pop-up’ behind the Savings Bank on Regent Street during the 1876 National Eisteddfod. Attempts in the 1930s and ’50s to establish a museum were shortlived and many items were lost. It would be over a century before a serious effort was made to collect and safeguard Wrexham’s heritage. The ‘Museum of Two Halves’ project is an exciting leap forward, and will create a museum fit for a 21st-century Welsh city and community. The project is being supported by Welsh Government, Wrexham County Borough Council and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. www.wrexhamheritage.wales

WHAT’S ON IN BRIEF

6TH-14TH MAY