Image Museum Wales.
The history of our famous Wrexham Tailor's Quilt. A 150 year old story of how we’re all connected and stitched together.
Wrexham
Taylor's
Quilt
Liam Stokes-Massey, one of our prominent local artists - aka Pencilcraftsman - patiently recreated the Wrexham Tailor’s Quilt as a large mural on College Street earlier this summer.
Wrexham's local historical masterpiece.
A major part of the Public Art Trail for the Wrecsam2029 bid. Created to both celebrate the city's industrial heritage and our year-long festival 1876 Year of Wonder.
The physical location of the mural today is fitting because the original creator, James Williams, was a master tailor from Wrexham, and actually lived and worked at 8 College Street Wrexham. James spent a decade completing the piece in his spare time, and it was displayed at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Wrexham in 1876, at the Palace of Arts in Wembley in 1925, and at the Wrexham National Eisteddfod in 1933.
This is the same street and location as Liam's mural is sited today. Easily found behind the Parish pub at the bottom of Town Hill, and set back some 30m down College Street itself.
Honouring
Local
Tailoring.
The artwork honours local tailoring history through vibrant, large-scale design, contributing to Wrexham’s growing cultural identity, and draws on many local landmarks and images. They were famous at the time, and still famous today.
The Wrexham Tailor's Quilt comprises 4,525 woollen pieces, mainly military uniform, joined with overcast stitches. Its design features a geometric background, national emblems, and a range of motifs including biblical scenes, alongside regionally significant landmarks such as the Menai Bridge and Cefn Viaduct, all detailed in the original quilt with silk embroidery.
Wrexham.
A Living
Quilt.
We like to think of Wrexham not as a single story, but more like a massive, living quilt. That’s exactly what the Wrexham Tailor’s Quilt means to us: its a stunning patchwork masterpiece made by a local over many years between 1842 and 1852. A skilled individual, who in his spare time spent a decade stitching together 4,525 scraps of wool, military uniform off-cuts, recycled cloth, and odd bits of history - to create something far greater than the sum of all its parts.
Whilst the original is stored today in The Museum of Wales in Cardiff, Liam has managed to bring a far larger than life version of it - all the way back to its true ancestral home.
Modern
Celebration.
We don’t think of this quilt as just a museum piece; it’s the perfect metaphor for our amazing town. Wrexham has always been a place where different bits come together to make something special. Back then, it was industrial might and the power and influence of the church. Today, it’s an mix of Hollywood fame, local pubs, ancient history, beautiful scenery, a new city eyeing up its future and a football club fiercely on the rise.
Just like James Williams who took those random scraps and made art, we’re helping take the football boom, the Year of Wonder celebrations, and our thriving arts scene and weaving them together into a new identity.
2026 is our Year of Wonder. We’re spending 2026 helping to stitch together the stories that make up our town’s future.
Right now, we’ve captured around 100 pages of stories and content. Fixtures, artists, new museums, new attractions, business profiles, charity stories, and event guides.
Sometimes Visit Wrexham's site can feel like a bit of a wild mix, with the football and trending local socials always shouting the loudest for our attention. But if you look closer, you can see the stitching. The football is a bold red patch that grabs your attention first. The film and music festivals and art trails are the colourful, creative patches adding texture. The charities and community groups are the warm patches that show the town’s heart. And the Year of Wonder? That’s the historic patch celebrating 150 years since the original quilt was first shown at the 1876 Art Treasures Exhibition.
We've only
just started.
The beauty of a quilt is that it’s never really finished. It just grows. James Williams took his time, stitch by stitch, because he knew it would last. That’s the lesson for us today. The love of football for many in Wrexham is real and deep, and yes, the hype of promotions and winning city of culture bids is exciting. But real growth happens slowly, organically, just like a quilt being stitched together over many years. The Visit Wrexham site is our digital needle and thread. Our locals help us connect the dots, showing that you can’t have the football story without the history, the art, the live gigs or the community.
See the
whole
picture.
So the next time you’re on our website, or walking up and down our streets, remember: you’re not just looking at one story. You’re looking at a patchwork. Each pub you visit, every shop you pop into, every museum you explore, and every gig you go to is adding a new patch to our quilt. Wrexham’s story is still being stitched, and we’re part of the team that are sewing it all together and working to a new grand design. Take a step back - and see the whole picture.
