Wrexham is a Welsh border market town in North Wales, and with 70,000 people, one of the largest centres in the north of Wales.
The area has been settled since Bronze Age times, and the Romans built a settlement here, but that faded away and the name Wrexham tells of its refounding by Anglo-Saxons as Wryhtel's river meadow, showing that the settlement developed on the dry land its next to the floodplain water meadows of the small River Gwenfo.
Saxon times mark the start of a long period of conflict between the Welsh peoples of the mountains, and the Saxons of the plains. In the 8th century the Saxon kings of Mercia pushed the Welsh back and put up Offa's dyke just to the west of Wrexham.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, a castle was built here where the Clwedog and Black Brook meet by Hugo de Avanche, Earl of Chester and one of William's most trusted families. It was a small castle, probably with timber walls, of which only small remains of the motte remain at Errdig. It also used Wat's Dyke, a bank similar to Offa's Dyke as part of its defence.
Because of Edward Ist's campaigns against the Welsh, in the 13th century, Wales lost its independence and Wrexham became part of the Welsh Marches, the land straddling the border of England and Wales. In the 13th century the Marcher lords built a new stronghold just south of Wrexham at Chirk as part of Edward Ist's Ring of Stone, and the first castle of Erdigg was gradually lost. Chirk would have looked very different in medieval times from what we see today, however, having been almost completely rebuilt in the 16th 17th and 18th centuries. But you can still see why it was chosen for its commanding position.
Throughout medieval times, Wrexham's position between the Welsh Mountains and the plains of the north Midlands of England meant that it became a trading centre for sheep, reared on the mountains and sold for wool to England. Hope Street, Regent Street and Queen Street were all once wide streets designed to allow markets to be held in them.
As the market town grew, so it specialised in making small shields known as bucklers as well as leather and woolen goods.
Some of this wealth found its way into the building of a grand church - St Giles - and also into some fine Tudor homes.
It was in medieval times that iron, lead and coal began to be mined on a small scale.
But the scale of industry all changed when the Industrial Revolution began. The presence of iron and coal for making steel in the same place led to John Wilkinson opening the Bersham Ironworks in 1762. From then on, while the core of Wrexham remained looking like a market town, all around became a patchwork of industrial villages, either mining coal, making steel or making goods from steel.
In 1851, the population of Wrexham was 6,714; within thirty years this had increased to 10,978. As the town prospered in Victorian times, so the wealth allowed many grand building to be put up in High Street. Most of those still survive. And look at them on a map and you will see the ones backing on to the church are all on narrow plots of land called burgage plots, from medieval times when all houses grew their own food.
Then in 1880 a German immigrant saw the importance of the groundwater below Wrexham for making lager beer, and the first lager brewery in Britain was founded, making Wrexham famous for its brew.
By 1913, the North East Wales coalfield was producing up to 3 million tonnes a year, and employed over 10,000 people. However, like all natural resources, easily mined resources eventually run out, and the industry went into decline. The last pit to close was Bersham Colliery, and by 1986 brickworks, steelworks and breweries had all stopped, too.
As in other parts of Britain, the 1980s saw regional development agencies founded to invest in areas where traditional heavy industries had disappeared leaving high unemployment.
But Wrexham found it had new advantages. It is not far from the major business centres of Chester and Manchester. So what has happened to jobs in and around the town? Wrexham has moved away from heavy industry to high tech manufacturing based on aircraft and cars, bio-technology, finance and professional services, many on the surrounding industrial estates. Being close to a major English centre, but with land less expensive has also benefited Wrexham, and food processing - factories needing good road connections - have also moved here.
And what of the historic centre? Today some of these old features of the town are also the basis of a tourist industry. The church precinct, and the surrounding narrow enclosed streets and alleyways still have a medieval character.
