As the largest town in North Wales, Wrexham carries quite a bit of importance in the region. It is the administrative center of the Wrexham County Borough and it is also the center of retail, industry, and commerce in North Wales. The city proper has about forty five thousand citizens but if you include the entire greater urban area of the city then you have a more comprehensive population of around one hundred and fifty thousand. This total places Wrexham and its surroundings behind only three districts in Wales in terms of size and population.

For such a large city, Wrexham maintains much of the natural beauty that it has always possessed and this makes it a bit anomalous among other large cities in the United Kingdom. The Welsh Mountains and the Dee Valley both come together on either side of Wrexham to provide a stunning landscape for the many residents of the city. One can only imagine how beautiful Wrexham was eight thousand years ago when it was first inhabited by humans. At any rate, the Wrexham we know and love didn't truly begin to build itself up until the 1700s. This is the time when the city began to be known around the region for its superior leather products. Skinning and tanning was big business at the time and Wrexham was filled to the brim with the trade. Nearly every part of the cow was used in some capacity in Wrexham, from horns used to make buttons to hooves used for several different purposes. Despite the burgeoning growth of the leather trade, Wrexham still had a fairly meager population of around two thousand citizens at this time and the city didn't truly explode in growth until the Industrial Revolution. By the 1800s, though, smelting hit Wrexham in a big way and the city was never the same again.

The mid 1800s saw perhaps the fastest growth in the history of the city with newspapers, market squares, and breweries popping up all around town. Brickwork, coal mines, and steel factories were built in the subsequent decades and Wrexham saw its fortunes increase all the way through the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the recent years have been difficult for Wrexham and the town entered a fairly sizable period of depression toward the last half of the 1900s. Many coal mines and steelworks were shut down and countless jobs were lost as the city struggled to hold on to what little industry it had left. Luckily, it seems that the worst of those difficult years is over and Wrexham is now in the process of rebuilding its downtown area. Money is finally being pumped into the old infrastructure and the next couple decades look to be very pivotal for the future of the city. One can only hope that Wrexham lands squarely on its feet and if current trends are any indication we can all rest comfortable knowing that the city will likely be back on top in no time.

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The Wrexham Tourist Board gives comparable information to this page. If you require more information about Wrexham, you may be able to obtain it from the Wrexham Tourist Board.