A-Z of Services

Wrexham Incorporated

In 1857, 646 people were entitled to vote as burgesses (Burgesses were men with voting rights. You could become a burgess if you owned enough property or a business in the town.) and 206 were entitled to stand as councillors, but the Borough Council’s duty was to all the town’s inhabitants.

George Bradley, one of Wrexham’s early mayors.
© Wrexham Archives

No project was entered upon without the closest investigation as to the cost to the ratepayers, and careful regard for the healthy progress and advancement of the Borough.

Thomas Bury, second Town Clerk, writing in 1907

Wrexham’s first Guildhall, Chester Street, 1914.
© Wrexham Archives

The Council’s priority was to tackle the poor sanitation and housing in Wrexham. Between 1863 and 1867, the Council installed a proper sewerage system and the last cesspool privy was closed by 1894. The Council built an isolation hospital for people with infectious diseases, appointed a health visitor to advise mothers of new born children, and opened public baths (for washing as well as swimming!) on Tuttle Street.

The health benefits were obvious. The town’s death rate fell from 29 per thousand in 1857 to 11 per thousand in 1957. The health visitor helped reduce infant mortality from 152 per thousand in 1907 to 29 per thousand in 1957.

Condemned housing on Farndon Street, Wrexham.
© Wrexham Archives

The Council’s Medical and Sanitary Officers also worked to improve living conditions in the slums of Wrexham, often contrary to the moralising attitudes of the time. By 1907 the Council realised that improving life in the slums was not enough, they had to be cleared away and new housing built. Wrexham’s first council estate, designed by the renowned architect, Patrick Abercombie, was built on land in Acton Park in the 1920s. After the Second World War, Queen’s Park was built as Wrexham’s New Jerusalem in the Caia fields. The slums were cleared away, but ending poverty and social exclusion is a task that the Council still works to achieve today.

Queen’s Park is being developed to become a complete social entity with its own school, places of worship, shopping centre, playing fields and a community centre.

A History of Wrexham, 1957

The Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors of the Borough of Wrexham, 1957.
© Wrexham Archives

The Council worked to improve the town in many ways. Streets were paved and widened and new roads built after 1879 using the Council’s first ever steamroller. In 1895 the Council established the first professional fire brigade in the Borough after the ineffective local volunteer brigade had become the butt of too many jokes.

Mrs Milly Edwards-Jones, Wrexham first female mayor, 1927–29.
© Wrexham Archives

The Borough Council petitioned Parliament to support the construction of new railway lines to Wrexham and called on the railway companies to offer cheaper services. The Council supported economic development in many ways: successfully lobbying Parliament for the abolition of the expensive tollgates that surrounded the town, building a new cattle market off Smithfield Road, and modernising the town’s fairs and produce markets; including the construction of a new Vegetable Market, and more recently the People’s Market.

Children from Acton Park School help celebrate the extension of the borough, 1935.
© Wrexham Archives

Education and the well-being of children soon became a priority. The Borough Council opened a public library in 1878 and the Town Clerk applied to Carnegie for the money for the town’s first purpose built library. The Borough Council helped to establish the town’s School Board in 1871 and supported vocational education, a radical idea for the time, by opening the Wrexham School of Science & Art in 1888, even though schooling was not its responsibility. Now schools are the Council’s responsibility and education has become one of the priority services of local government.

The Council, aided by donations from local people, transformed the Parciau into a public park and recreation ground. John Jones, the Island Green brewer, and William Aston, local businessman, donated Rhosddu Recreation Ground and Acton Park respectively to the town. The Council’s Countryside Services continue this earlier tradition of providing open recreational space for local people today.

This document with added images is available to download in the following format:

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