Welcome To Wrexham 1989 Video

A while back we posted this video of the town in 1991 that was doing the rounds on social network sites, this prompted Wrexham.com reader Richard Knew to get in touch!

It turns out that after graduating from film school in Plymouth in the early 90’s, Richard began working for Wrexham Community Video – a unique local authority project. This ran from 1984 to 1996 and was funded by Wrexham Maelor Borough Council and North Wales Arts Association. Many young people with an aspiration to work in the media and television worked there and practised their skills making films about local events and history.

When the project was closed due to council cut backs, Richard set up his own corporate video production business – Knew Productions Ltd. The collection of old Wrexham Community Videos were preserved and archived by Richard and his team…but then pretty much forgotten about!

Knew Productions is now a national award winning, video production company. For fifteen years they have been creating videos in North East Wales and across the UK. Their clients are diverse and include Visit Wales, The British Army, Sharp, Nightingale House Hospice and The National Trust. The team include a BAFTA winning cameraman, video editors, script writers and sound recordists – all this on our doorstep and we didn’t know!

Richard himself has won several short film awards, in the Melbourne Film Festival, London International Film Festival, Houston Film Festival….and the list goes on! Richard has also directed and edited numerous programmes for BBC Wales and ITV Wales.

When Richard got in touch we popped over to his studio in Rossett and started watching literally hours of old material about the town. Over the coming months, and perhaps years, we hope to uncover and share as much as possible on the internet. Richard, who has used his skills to recover these old videos and helped us to get them online, does want to stress that they are very old – some older than the author of this article! As such do not take these as examples of current work (Knew Productions have a fancy showreel here to compare!)

Anyway, without further ado, here is the first video in all its late 80’s shell suited cheesy music low res glory…. Welcome To Wrexham 1989!

We would ask anyone with any historic images or videos of Wrexham & the surrounding area to get in touch with us , or if you know someone in this video or have a story connected then please do get in touch with us  or [email protected] – or post in this thread on our forums!