Kidwelly Industrial Museum
The Kidwelly Industrial Museum is an industrial museum with a focus on tinplate production in Wales in the UK . The museum is located about 2 km northeast of downtown Kidwelly on the site of a historic tinplate factory on the Gwendraeth Fach River .
history
On the site of a forge, Charles Gwynn founded the first tinplate factory in Wales in 1737, which was also the second in Great Britain. The plant used the hydropower of the Gwendraeth Fach, iron was sourced from South Wales and tin was brought to the plant from Cornwall via the port of Kidwelly. The factory was expanded and rebuilt several times, and a steam engine was installed after 1860. At its peak in 1908 the factory employed up to 400 workers, but the number of employees fluctuated widely. The factory was the main employer of Kidwelly, in the 19th century half of the world's tinplate production came from the region around Kidwelly, especially from neighboring Llanelli . When the import of tin from Malaysia stalled during the Second World War , the plant was shut down in 1941. In the following decades some of the buildings were demolished and others were used as warehouses. From 1980 a small group of volunteers tried to preserve the former factory with the machines that were still in existence as an industrial monument, which was finally opened as a museum with the support of sponsors and the Llanelli Borough Council . The industrial museum is now operated by the Kidwelly Industrial Museum Trust together with the Carmarthenshire County Museum Service .
investment
The museum is located on the left, eastern bank of the Gwendraeth, which was dammed here with a weir to generate water power. Several industrial buildings built from brick between 1880 and 1919, including the sorting room , the hot roll and the machine house for the cold roll, have been preserved from the factory. Because of the preserved original machines, the buildings are protected as a Grade II * cultural monument . At the northern end of the site, a headframe from the former Morlais colliery in Llangennech was rebuilt.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Carmarthenshire Museums: Kidwelly Industrial Museum. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on September 25, 2012 ; Retrieved April 21, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Cadw Listed Building Database Record: Cold-roll Engine-house at former Kidwelly Tinplate Works. Retrieved April 21, 2014 .
- ↑ Coflein Kidwelly Tinplate Works; Kidwelly Industrial Museum. Retrieved April 21, 2014 .
Coordinates: 51 ° 44 ′ 50.6 " N , 4 ° 17 ′ 10.3" W.