Visitors to a revamped museum of history will be treated to glimpses into 230,000 years of life in Wales, ranging from an insight into what it must have been like to step into a medieval prince’s court to how it felt being a posh Cardiff caravaner in the 1950s.
St Fagans National Museum of History, Wales’ largest and most beloved heritage attraction, is celebrating the completion of a spectacular £30m, six-year transformation that has added features and revitalised old favourites.
Among the intriguing exhibits at the museum, on the outskirts of Cardiff, is a life-sized model of a Neanderthal child together with – real – Neanderthal teeth that were found at Pontnewydd Cave in Denbighshire, north Wales.
Another standout object is a sinister-looking “anti-suffragette voodoo doll”, which was sent to a woman, presumably by someone who did not care for women’s voting rights, a century ago.
St Fagans is a largely open-air museum that originally opened as the Welsh Folk Museum in 1948 and includes more than 50 buildings moved from locations all around Wales.
About half a million visitors make the trip there annually. Since 2012 it has been undergoing an ambitious redevelopment thanks to cash from bodies including the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Welsh government.
The museum has remained open during the revamp and Nia Williams, its director of learning, said the idea had been to turn the redevelopment into a public programme. “St Fagans has always been a museum for people but we thought a lot of the experiences people were having were passive, they were watching museum staff doing things rather than actively participating themselves,” she said.
They also went back to the beginnings of the museum and looked again at the ideas of one of the museum’s founders, the poet and scholar Iorwerth Peate, who believed it could reflect society, be for society, and continue to change and involve.
The museum also drew inspiration from the Marxist academic and writer Raymond Williams and the belief that culture belongs to everybody.
In practical terms this has meant the museum has gone out into the community and asked people to vote on what groups of exhibits they would like to see and then giving them hands-on involvement in turning their ideas into reality.
More than 3,000 volunteers and 120 charities and community groups and organisations have helped shape the project, with schoolchildren, apprentices and artists all working on the scheme.
Appropriately, one of the new galleries is Gweithdy – the Welsh word for workshop. It celebrates the skills of generations of craftspeople and visitors will be able to try their hand at traditional skills.
In the “Life is …” gallery people will be able to explore how generations have dressed, prepared food, worked, played and mourned. A handcrafted caravan, created by Cardiff furniture makers Louis Blow & Company of Canton for the Dodds family in the early 1950s, is one of the exhibits. The caravan cost more than a terraced house at the time.
Another is the gleaming coffee machine that was used by brothers Luigi, Giuseppe and Ronaldo Rabaiotti at their cafe in Port Talbot, south Wales. It helps tell the tale of the Italian/Welsh coffee culture decades ahead of the current trend.
There will even be a chance to sleep over in one of the exhibits, a recreation of one of Llywelyn the Great’s 13th century royal courts, based on archaeological excavations on Anglesey, north Wales. From April, school parties will be able to stay overnight at the court beneath the thatched roof.
David Anderson, the director general of Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales), the umbrella organisation that includes seven museums, said: “The story of Wales is still evolving and so is the museum. We believe we have preserved everything that people love about St Fagans, but introduced important new dimensions.
“We see this not as a project but as a way of working for the whole organisation, based on social justice and participation, which we will sustain and develop in the years ahead.”
