Wrexham MP Ian Lucas hails ‘inspirational’ Google event in town centre

“Wrexham showed it was up for Google and our visitors from Google were up for Wrexham” was the message last week following a huge turnout at a free digital masterclass.

Digital experts from Google were in Wrexham on Friday May 11th for the first time – and were taken aback by the number of people who showed a real appetite for improving their social media skills.

Ian Lucas MP was proud to see the Google Digital Garage event – a free day-long masterclass delivered by the search engine giants – prove to be such a success.

The Wrexham MP had helped secure the visit from Google through his work on the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.

He gave speech at the start of the event, which took place at the new ‘Town Square’ / Wrexham Enterprise Hub on Rhosddu Road.

Commenting after the event, Mr Lucas said: “The Google Digital Garage was a vibrant and imaginative event – and it certainly caught the imagination of the people of the town. I found it inspirational to see so many people in attendance.

“But this is just the start of things. I hope the people who came to the event learnt a lot and can use it to help grow their businesses, which of course will be good news for Wrexham.”

Mr Lucas added: “There is a great pool of talent in towns and Wrexham is no exception. Wrexham showed it was up for Google and our visitors from Google were up for Wrexham.”

Since launching in 2015, Google’s Digital Garages have trained more than 250,000 people and visited more than 200 villages, towns and cities in the UK. The event in Wrexham was the first in a series of visits to market towns, with the aim being to help people adapt and thrive in the digital age.

The session was free to attend and proved particularly popular with small businesses, as there were courses on building digital market plans, social media strategy, search engine optimisation and digital advertising.

There were also workshops where Google experts worked one-to-one with individuals.

Eleanor Linsell, public policy and local programmes manager at Google, attended Friday’s event and was pleased it was such a success.

“It’s gone really well in Wrexham and I’m really happy to see such a huge number of people come out,” said Eleanor.

“We ended up delivering a total of 281 trainings, which is excellent. We were really encouraged to see that the people of Wrexham were so excited and engaged in digital skills and look forward to hearing the positive outcomes that these training sessions will have had on businesses in the local area.”

Eleanor added: “We really wanted to come out to market towns. Before we’ve visited cities and coastal towns, but we realised market towns also really need this kind of investment.

“There is definitely an appetite for it and it’s essential for growing local economies