Stori Brymbo:
A 300 Million Year Journey
NATURE - INDUSTRY - PEOPLE
A community led visitor attraction in the making, launches in 2024
This is our big project concerned with understanding Brymbo Fossil Forest alongside the restoration and sustainable reuse of the remains of the former Brymbo Iron and Steelworks. It’s ambitious, complex, and difficult – but it stands to make a huge impact.
Fossil Forest meets industrial heritage, they marry and live happily ever after....
Discovered in 2003 by accident, the in-situ fossils provide world-class evidence of how coal and ironstone were formed millions of years ago. We’ll be excavating, exploring, researching, conserving and exhibiting them as part of Stori Brymbo, and to enable this we’ll be constructing a bespoke shelter building over part of the fossil forest area. We’ve had a series of false-starts in getting the building work underway, but 2022 is lining up to see it finally happen. And despite the current simple black sheeting over the building site area there’s loads going on in readiness – see the blog and mini-site here.
The Fossil Forrest will become of the starting point for understanding Brymbo’s natural, industrial and social development, with the former iron and steelworks buildings and structures of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries telling the wider story and housing new functions of welcome centre, volunteering and learning hub.
The programme of building repairs and restorations will involve everything from installing the necessary drainage and services, to repurposing the Grade II* listed Agent’s House and the Scheduled Moment Pattern Makers’ Workshop into homes for permanent exhibitions. The 1920 Machine Shop will become our centrepiece, our ‘engine room’, if you like.
Guided by specialists and professionals, the full package of building works and restoration will enable us to open fully to you and the wider public in 2024 or 2025.
The link here takes you to the holding page of the website that we’ll move to over the coming years ahead of Stori Brymbo opening. It celebrates the achievement of our biggest funding award in March 2020 – just as the pandemic struck.
