The Blaenavon Industrial Landscape World Heritage Site includes houses from the 1780s, which vividly illustrate the domestic life of iron industry workers and their families. These houses were used in a recent BBC reality show in which three present-day Welsh families were sent "back in time" to live as though they were in the 1920s.
Photo Crown Copyright (2009) Visit Wales
Keith Rees, a former woolen mill worker who now interprets the National Woolen Museum in Dre-fach Felindra, West Wales, shows visitors examples of Welsh flannel.
Photo by Brenda Dayne
Keith Rees, a former woolen mill worker who now interprets the National Woolen Museum in Dre-fach Felindra, West Wales, shows visitors examples of Welsh flannel.
Photo by Brenda Dayne
Keith Rees, a former woolen mill worker who now interprets the National Woolen Museum in Dre-fach Felindra, West Wales, shows visitors examples of Welsh flannel.
Photo by Brenda Dayne
Ray Smith, recently retired master carpenter at St. Fagans: National History Museum, works on the recreated rood screen for St. Teilo's Church, a medieval church re-erected at the museum.
Photo courtesy of St. Fagans: National History Museum
Although once known as the world's first industrialized nation, Wales is more celebrated today for its rural, bucolic landscapes. Its history of heavy manufacturing and natural resource extraction lives only in the memories of former workers in the coal, slate, iron, and woolen industries.
Fortunately, many industrial sites—including several branches of the National Museum Wales—have become heritage interpretation sites, employing some of these former workers as guides. For instance, St. Fagans: National History Museum is in part an open-air museum where special demonstrations of crafts and domestic life illustrate both the rural and the industrial history of Wales. The museum interprets Welsh contemporary culture, including that of some of the country's most recent immigrants, around the theme of belonging.
