I had an excuse today to get in the car and go into town to pick up something other than groceries . I needed to pick up some pipe fittings and screws and this would give me the opportunity to visit the town I had not walked around for some years. I told myself my trip was essential .
I wondered what sort of surprises it would present me with . I wondered if I would be disapppinted in what I saw . I wanted to see my home town as a tourist would . With tourists eyes . To look at it the same way as I would a town or city I visited in Gabby .
The sad thing about going back to a place is that it sometimes does not live up to memories or expectations . I had grown up around these parts and had a vision in my head of the town in the 1950s and 1960s when I went on the bus every week with my gran. We had rituals . We did the same thing every week . We went in the same shops . A trip to the rent office in
an old hotel . A hotel built in the Victorian era when the trains were filled with passengers who wanted to visit Wrexham. The Imperial Hotel - there you go it came to me . I remember the old balcony and the shape of the building . Nothing left of it now .It was built into a corner and oddly shaped .
We continued to the Post Office . A massive Victorian edifice with a huge hall filled with massive windows and glass counters where the clerks waited for customers who wanted to buy stamps and postal orders . The building remains . It has been a Jobcentre , an extension to the Town Hall . Now I wasnt sure what it was .
The Royal Bank of Scotland closed . The town this end looked sadly derelict with empty shops and with Covid not a lot of footfall. Mum and gran would have recognised some of it but would have been appalled at the emptiness .
I parked up on Llwyn Isaf on the car park which now stood on the gardens of the local vicars pile . I fed the machine with a £1 coin
which gave me a ticket for one hours parking . I thought an hour walking in the cold would be plenty . It was not as if I would get lost . I knew the town too well . I couldnt stop for a coffee . All the coffee shops were closed .
I made my way up to the junction of Egerton Street and Lord Street and I stood at the side of the steel the industry of the town .This was a new edition to the streetscape of my home town . It looked interesting and told the story of Steelmaking and Coalmining . The steel works at Brymbo were founded by the industrialist John ‘Iron Mad Wilkinson (1728–1808). He made his fortune pioneering the manufacture of cast iron goods. Following his successful iron smelting business locally and the invention of new technologies, steel production began on site from 1885 His business boomed over the following decades making him and the area prosperous . Sadly though like many of the heavy industries in the 1970s the industry declined and production ceased in 1990. The site in Brymbo as abandoned and the only clues to steelmaking
in the town this statue I was standing before . The proud miner stood opposite It looked as if they were at either end pulling an arch together . The miner too looked like he was clinging on to an industry long gone . When I was a child there were pits all around the town . Now none remain . Just this reminder of that heritage . I found out it was named the Arc and around it a the miner and the steelworker. .I wondered how many wandered past it by without a thought .
I walked towards the new library . A building that replaced the beautiful older building on Queen Street . New if you count the 1970s as new . It replaced a much nicer building . The Victorians knew how to build . Sadly I felt modern WRexham fell down on so many scores .
The old boys grammar school was now attached to the new Coleg Cambria . Not a bad marriage between red brick and modern glass . The old girls school abandoned. The windows covered in metal to prevent intruders . The grounds once well loved were neglected . The 60s Science Block demolished .
