Qualla: St Fagans National Museum of History

St Fagans National Museum of History: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ceridwen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk into a row of ironworkers' cottages at St Fagans and you walk through two centuries. The first house is furnished as it would have been in 1805: a single room, a fireplace, an iron pot. The last is 1985: wallpaper, a television set, a plastic washing-up bowl. These six terraced houses were dismantled stone by stone from Rhyd-y-car near Merthyr Tydfil and rebuilt on the grounds of an Elizabethan manor house outside Cardiff. They are one exhibit among more than forty in a museum that has spent the better part of eighty years rescuing the architecture of Wales from demolition and decay.

Image: ceridwen | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Fagans National Museum of History: Iorwerth Peate's Impossible Ambition

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sionk, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum exists because of one man's stubborn vision. Iorwerth Peate, a scholar and poet, convinced the Earl of Plymouth to donate his castle and grounds to the nation in 1946, then set about creating an outdoor museum modelled on Skansen in Stockholm. But Peate faced a problem...

Image: Sionk | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Fagans National Museum of History: A Country Reassembled

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gareth James, CC BY-SA 2.0. The collection reads like a census of Welsh life across the ages. There are Iron Age roundhouses reconstructed from archaeological evidence found on Anglesey, their thatched roofs dark with turf smoke. A medieval prince's court, Llys Llywelyn, was built from the footprint of Llys...

Image: Gareth James | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Fagans National Museum of History: The Vulcan Comes Home

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit --Immanuel Giel 11:23, 16 August 2007 (UTC), Public domain. In May 2024, the historic Vulcan public house completed its journey from Newtown in Cardiff to the museum grounds. The pub, a fixture of its neighbourhood since the nineteenth century, had been threatened with demolition as the city redeveloped around it. Its relocation was a yea...

Image: --Immanuel Giel 11:23, 16 August 2007 (UTC) | Public domain

St Fagans National Museum of History: Museum of the Year

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Cummings, CC BY-SA 3.0. A six-year, 30-million-pound redevelopment was completed in 2018, funded by the Welsh Government and the National Lottery. The project added three new galleries, improved the Iron Age farmstead and medieval court, and created the Gweithdy, a sustainable workshop building where tr...

Image: John Cummings | CC BY-SA 3.0