Wrexham’s landscapes past and present are tied together by the theme of contestation – in the early medieval past it was conflict and control over the broader landscape mediated by Mercia’s construction of linear earthworks – Offa’s Dyke and Wat’s Dyke. In the present it’s the sporting contests taking place regularly on the pitch of the Racecourse Ground.

In this post, I wish to explore this connection, and its as-yet untapped potential for public engagement and education for Wrexham’s heritage by reviewing the first two series of the FX sports documentary ‘Welcome to Wrexham‘. The show follows the fortunes of Wrexham AFC from its acquisition by co-chairmen Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds in February 2021. My particular interest lies in how the conception of Wrexham and its football club are portrayed not only as Welsh but part of the borderlands, and how the history of the Anglo-Welsh borderlands including Wrexham County Borough and City are represented.

This topic relates to my ongoing work on the archaeology and heritage of linear earthworks. Most specifically, I’ve published on Wat’s Dyke – its placement and landscape context, as well as its heritage interpretation. I’ve also published a comic (with John Swogger) and as well as a reflection on the process of making it. John and I featured the stretch of Wat’s Dyke running beside the Racecourse Stadium.

General evaluation

The television documentary is effective and entertaining in being eclectic, sometimes funny, often gripping. It charts more than the management of the club and the team’s performances on the field, but delves into the stories and tribulations of select players and local fans. The storyline of a downtrodden working-class city whose fortunes are buoyed through the renewed investment and successes of its football team is emotive and engaging. Whilst it would be easy to dismiss this narrative as exemplifying the widespread use of football to LARP British working class culture, doubly so for celebrity takeovers, triply so for documentaries romanticising and sentimentalising the phenomenon, there remains a core heartfelt sincerity and authenticity to the story. Certainly the people and place of Wrexham are represented in a fashion that has no parallel and in a fashion that is neither overtly patronising nor one-dimensional.

The built environment and countryside of Wrexham County Borough are integrated and integral to this narrative, including many archaeological components to Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground, urban and suburban environs, and the villages and the rural landscape. Together with small cameos on Welsh history and culture, and the more sustained explorations of the past especially in the series 1 episode 7 – Welsh or Else – and the series 2 episode 10 – Gresford – the history, archaeology and heritage of Wrexham takes centre stage. As such, ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ tells elements of the story of Wrexham’s past in place and time, facilitating a regenerated identity for the present rooted in a memoryscape of people, place and things.

The history of Wales

In episode 7 of the first series – Welsh or Else – the history of Wales is introduced and Wrexham located within it. A simplified and stereotyped view of Wales is the inevitable result, and Wrexham’s borderland situation is not tackled at all satisfactorily. Most disappointing of all is the failure to capture a sense of the relationship between the city, county borough, and the two great linear earthworks of the early medieval borderland: Offa’s Dyke and Wat’s Dyke. The former is close to Wrexham, crossing the Clywedog at Nant Mill. The latter runs right by the Racecourse Stadium beside the railway line. Still, this is the rather amusing stylisation of the Welsh border:

Centuries later the Romans took over the region before leaving in the early fifth century. By the sixth the country was a patchwork of tribes and kingdoms. But around that time touchstones of what would become a unified Welsh culture were starting to emerge. Then in the eighth century an English king made built a man-made earthwork – which is a fancy archaeological term for piles of earth and rock along what was becoming the border between Wales and England. But the English kept peering over that tall earthy fence, by which I mean invading…WELCOME TO WREXHAM, SERIES 1, EPISODE 7: ‘WELSH OR ELSE’

The visuals accompanying this section represent Offa’s Dyke in a crude fashion, conflating Mercia and various Welsh polities include ‘England vs Wales’ in an anachronistic fashion.

This was a missed opportunity of creating a clear sense of the borderland’s complex evolution and the role of the linear earthwork of Offa’s Dyke, and to mention the proximity between the Racecourse and Wat’s Dyke specifically. Perhaps future series can do better.

The memoryscape of the Racecourse Stadium and Environs

The documentary is more effective in capturing the industrial and contemporary landscape of Wrexham in a series of nested fashions. First, we have the environs of the Racecourse Stadium home to Wrexham since 1872 – featured in opening aerial scenes viewed form the NW. The history of the stadium is repeatedly articulated, both for its hallowed age and as a manifestation of the club and its supporters, but also for its decline and neglect. In particular, the memorial bricks bearing the names of fans who sponsored the building of the Racecourse Stadium feature repeatedly on the series, showing the integration of fans’ support into the very architecture of the place. See more about this on my main Archaeodeath blog.

The most striking absence in the vicinity of the Racecourse Ground is the early medieval linear earthwork of Wat’s Dyke, which I featured with John Swogger in the recent ‘What’s Wat’s Dyke’ comic running past the Stadium and Wrexham General railway station. While the traces are not particularly visual or meaningful without clear explanation, a reconstructed section does sit adjacent to the Premier Inn. Moreover, the widespread use of aerial photography could have afforded an opportunity to frame the sporting venue as astride/adjacent an historical frontier work and thus epitomising the borderland or ‘liminal’ status of Wrexham writ large.

The mural on Crispin Lane

The Racecourse Ground and Wrexham city straddle a long-contested frontier zone that we can discern elements of from as early as the 8th and 9th centuries AD through the linear earthworks Offa’s Dyke and Wat’s Dyke. Despite this, the show has to date yet to engage with these great dykes in the borderlands despite the proximity of Wat’s Dyke to the home of Wrexham AFC. However, the landscape adjacent to Wat’s Dyke has been augmented by the show, since at the end of a terrace house on Crispin Lane, adjacent to the historical course of Wat’s Dyke, a new mural celebrating the television show has been raised.

The mural was first reported on in The Leader 21 April 2023, coinciding with the filming of season 2 of the series. Bearing a red dragon, football and the slogan ‘Welcome to Wrexham’, the small FX logo brands it as official and the work of the documentary company. Wrexham AFC claim not to be responsible for the mural. See also reports here and here.

Within a month it was vandalised by Chester City fans ahead of the club’s victory parade to celebrate their promotion.

This mural augments other temporary ways by which football, the Wrexham club, its sponsors and the club’s celebrity buyers have impacted the landscape. A temporary Hollywood-style white letter sign was established on Bersham Colliery overlooking the A483 in 2021 by Vanarama who sponsor the National League before donating it to fans when permission to maintain the sign was not renewed by the landowners. Meanwhile, in Wrexham itself, a succession of murals have been added to the side of the Fat Boar on Yorke Street. First unveiled in support of the national side’s World Cup appearances in November 2022, it was recreated to honour Wrexham AFC’s striker Paul Mullin in August 2023.

Yet the Crispin Lane mural, adjacent to the sleeping giant of the early medieval frontier work of Wat’s Dyke and close by the Racecourse Ground, has placed ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ most overtly on the map. Who knows whether the proximity to a monument revealing the contested history of this landscape will be recognised as somehow analogous or foreshadowing the present-day fierce football competition in the EFL League 2? There is certainly considerable potential for using the tide of fresh interest in Wrexham and its football club to engage the local community and tourists alike in the story of the Anglo-Welsh borderlands, including the early medieval Wat’s Dyke.