Welcome To THE GALLERY

Picture This!

I like to think that I live in one of the world's good places.

At least, there are certainly worse places to live, some of them not very far away.

I live in a village called Brymbo. It stands on a hillside approximately 5 kilometres north-west of the town of Wrexham in the north of Wales. It is a village with a long and proud history of steel manufacture, stretching back to the days of Wilkinson over two hundred years ago. Some of the best special steels in the world were made here.

Sadly, the company was bought by a bunch of asset-strippers in the mid-1980s, who deliberately failed to invest in it as a ready pretext for shutting it down late in 1990, with the direct loss of over 1200 jobs and the indirect loss of hundreds more.

Over thirty years on, we are still having to live with the consequences of that economic vandalism in terms of lack of jobs, lack of amenities, and the psychological effects on the community. It took fifteen years for redevelopment to begin on the site - a scandal which would have had heads rolling had it happened in the south of our country, in Scotland or in England. The houses and flats (sorry, I mean apartments) which have gone up on the site were used as cash-cows for the developers and the landlord class, so there's no money for rest of the development - the parts which were supposed to bring us new facilities and new jobs. We wait, and wait, and still we wait...

And the historical buildings still remaining on the steelworks site have been falling into actual ruin because the developers, the local council and the heritage quangos keep passing the buck between them. There won't be anything left to preserve before very long.

One consolation is that the village is surrounded on three sides by open country, which means that a five-minutes' walk from my gate takes me out amongst fields and hedges.

You can see a few sights (past and present) from the village in The Gallery, but it also includes a variety of other pictures of the Wrexham area and beyond, plus a few which don't fit into any geographical category. It also includes a set of photographs of me at various ages, just in case you want something to keep the kids away from the computer.

Click on the camera to enter The Gallery.

Please Note: Copyright is held in all photographs in this section. See each individual page for information on the copyright holder.

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