Wrexham Accommodation

More About Wrexham

The English border is a few miles east and Chester about twenty minutes beyond it. The Dee valley and the Clwydian hills lie the same distance the other way, which makes this an unusually easy base for a first trip into Wales.

St Giles’ church stands in the middle of the city with a tower of 136 feet. The Racecourse Ground is a few minutes’ walk from it, and Erddig sits on the southern edge with gardens running down to the Clywedog valley.

Wrexham grew rich on coal, brewing, leather and iron, and was long the largest town in north Wales. The most important thing ever made here was a hole.

At Bersham, just west of the centre, John Wilkinson worked out how to bore a cylinder truly round. Before him a steam-engine cylinder was only as good as the man hammering it, and steam escaped past the piston in quantities that made the whole engine barely worth having.

Wilkinson patented his boring machine in 1774 and supplied Boulton and Watt for twenty years afterwards. His cylinders are the reason James Watt’s engines worked at all, which makes a field outside Wrexham one of the places the industrial age actually started.

The tower of St Giles’ went up from 1506 on the back of that older prosperity. In the churchyard below it lies Elihu Yale, the merchant whose gift of books and goods led a small Connecticut college to take his name in 1718.

You can go up that tower on the first Saturday of the month, at eleven or twelve, for five pounds a head. It takes about fifty minutes, places are capped at twenty and they go quickly, so book through the Wrexham Visitor Information Centre first.

The Racecourse Ground stands a few minutes from the middle of the city on foot. It is the oldest international football stadium still in use anywhere in the world and it holds 13,341. On a match day the pubs between it and the town fill from lunchtime.

Erddig, on the southern edge, is a country house the National Trust looks after, and the walk down through its gardens into the Clywedog valley makes an easy morning. The valley path carries on west for miles from there, flat the whole way.

The market is still the reason many people come into the middle of Wrexham, and the Clwydian hills start twenty minutes west. Chester sits twenty minutes east over the border, which makes a wet day simple to solve.