Wrexham Heritage Trail
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We are thinking of creating a Town center Heritage trail leaflet. What are peoples views on this and what do you think should be included?
@Martin Rees Jewellers 11300 wrote:
We are thinking of creating a Town center Heritage trail leaflet. What are peoples views on this and what do you think should be included?
Link below is a good start point:
Who’s it going to be aimed at..?
Primarily visitors and newcomers to the town – we want them to have a better, more fun experience while they’re in the town centre. But I’d like to think that locals will enjoy it too; when we’ve had displays in the shop, or material in our shop newsletter, about the town’s history, it always seems to be very popular.
The thinking and infrastructure has already been set out for linked tourism and trails, and as it’s success took root, it’s probably true to say that enthusiasm waned, and rather than drive forward and deliver the plan that had been agreed following a lot of work and money, the community moved on to other things (see the Wrexham Tourism Strategy in full, and associated documents such as rural trails, and village trails). A visitor experience will surely only succeed if the offer is good enough in the first place to attract customers, that they come to Wrexham because it’s more attractive and has more to offer that a competitive area, and happy customers go away and tell everyone else how good it is.
The North Wales Borderlands (visitwales.com) was created as part of this work, to position Wrexham and the other green areas as the gateway to North Wales.
Great idea
I would consult Phil Phillips who does the town trails. he has direct experience of taking the tourists around the town looking at interesting heritage sites. He could actually show some of the places that people find interesting.
There are so many interesting places and it might have been nice for someone to do a potted breakdown of street names and where their origins lie. I always think of Cobden, Bright, Villiers and Peel Streets all of which have Corn Law associations and so on.
Town heritage trail sounds brilliant
Thank you for the encouragement, Alun! Yes, I’ve got a whole list of people to consult/pick the brains of, and Phil Phillips is one of them, just haven’t had chance to speak to him yet…
The street names idea is an intriguing one – there are all sorts of different angles to approach it from – I think this first attempt will probably be relatively basic and simple, but hopefully then it will be just the start of further progress, with maybe even some interpretation boards out on the streets in time, who knows?
I certainly didn’t mean to imply in my earlier post that Wrexham isn’t already a fun place to visit! But Martin and I always enjoy our visits to a strange town or city much more when we can find out interesting things about its history, so we feel that some at least of Wrexham’s visitors would enjoy this as an extra activity.
The Council certainly has done a lot of hard work already – there are some brilliant resources out there on the internet already, such as this fabulous site “Boardman’s Architectural Tour of Wrexham” we found recently:
WCBC: Boardman’s Architectural Tour of WrexhamBut it’s not always easy for casual research to find them, plus of course not everyone has a smartphone! So a nice coloured leaflet (specifically about the town centre), available from lots of places, would fill a gap, I think…
Getting on really well now with the first draft of the Trail. Had a good chat with the people at the church this morning, and hoping to talk to someone from the Civic Society shortly.
Martin and I did a bit of the Boardman Tour with our smartphone on Sunday afternoon, it really is an excellent informative and fascinating piece of work :)
The Council and the Destination Wrexham group are being tremendously supportive and helpful with our project, and we hope that Glyndwr Uni’s Art & Design department are also going to be involved.
One person I am having real trouble tracking down is Phil Phillips (mentioned by Alan in a previous reply on this thread) – we have two phone numbers for him, neither seems to work any more! If anyone reading this knows him or has contacted him recently, could you call or e-mail our shop and let us have the details? Just click thru to our website from our Wrexham.com ad for our contact details.
Many thanks in advance, Ruth
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