Tŷ Pawb saw ‘10,000 visitors’ on opening day – more than Chester’s Storyhouse or Bangor’s Pontio

It has been estimated 10,000 people came through the doors of Tŷ Pawb on Bank Holiday Monday for the official opening of the centre.

The information was revealed at yesterday’s Town Centre Forum, which gave a quick run down of where things are a week into Tŷ Pawb’s life.

Dave Cupit presented a quick run down of some figures, including the estimated headline figure, which he added most would not contest as it was ‘shoulder to shoulder most of the day’.

Further detail was given of the events that have taken place, with around 350 people enjoying an event headlined by Gwenno on Saturday evening, and week one being described as ‘extremely successful’.

It was added that market traders had commented on how busy they had been, with some stating it had been ‘the best week of business for them in any market they had ever been in’.

Local MP Ian Lucas queried about the official website that is still not fully live ( TyPawb.Wales – although with a separate battle one Wrexham.com’er has been having with Nominet they can soon register TŷPawb.wales!) and therefore can’t be used to find out what is going on and when. With various fingers crossed and wood touched, the meeting was told the site is hoped to be live later this week and will have details on traders as well as events.

A new Events Officer is due to take up a role in the coming weeks and will be working closely with those in residence and will look to engage the people of Wrexham to what is going on inside Tŷ Pawb.

Focus Wales have their event 10th-12th of May and will be using Tŷ Pawb as their ‘principle base of operations’, and have all the event space booked out.

Vist Wales have ventured north and are looking to use Tŷ Pawb to put on an event surrounding locally sourced food, and the meeting was told that could take over the whole centre.

It is Record Store Day on the 21st of this month, and with an ‘in house record store’ Tŷ Pawb will be looking to put on an event to ‘celebrate vinyl’.

Further events figures were given, including 120 children attending various workshops, and fifteen people joining the volunteer crew all taken on after attending initial events. Students from Germany are also working at Tŷ Pawb as part of an english language improvement scheme, and visitors are encouraged to ‘go and have a chat with them’.

Cllr Dana Davies queried the poor mobile reception and virtually non existent internet connection and asked if extra money would need to be spent. Currently you can connect to the Tŷ Pawb wifi network however unless you are using Twitter the system does not allow any other traffic through.

Cllr Davies was told there had been a technical issue with the connection, and not a budget problem, and it is hoped it will be sorted very soon. A Council Officer added that a similar issue was delaying the activation of wifi in the town’s other two indoor markets.

The poor to non existent mobile phone reception in parts of Tŷ Pawb was recognised as the reality of life at the bottom of a largely concrete and metal building, however once the internet connection is sorted out it is hoped boosters can be brought in.

Wrexham.com did have a fiddle after the meeting, and on several devices tested a change of DNS servers to Google’s 8.8.8.8 and Cloudfare’s 1.1.1.1 meant that the Tŷ Pawb wifi login page showed for the first time, and a login was possible via the third party service. We would not suggest attempting this unless you know what you are doing.

As for the headline – we had a look back at Bangor’s Pontio and Chester’s Storyhouse openings, although both different offerings from themselves and to Tŷ Pawb we thought it worth a friendly comparison.

The £43m Pontio centre proudly spoke of 1,000 people enjoying their opening day, and the £37m Storyhouse saw just 3,500 over their opening day taking a full weekend to hit the 10k mark!

You can watch a quick video from Wrexham’s Bank Holiday Monday event and opening below…