Twentieth Century
| Wrexham Wrexham County Borough |
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In the latter half of the 20th century, Wrexham began a period of depression: the many coal mines closed first, followed by the brickworks and other industries, and finally the steelworks (which had its own railway branch up until closure) in the 1980s. Wrexham faced an economic crisis. Many residents were anxious to sell their homes and move to areas with better employment prospects, however buyers were uninterested in an area where there was little prospect of employment. Many home-owners were caught in a negative equity trap. Wrexham was suffering from the same problems as much of Industrialised Britain and saw little investment in the 1970s.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Welsh Development Agency (WDA) intervened to improve Wrexham's situation: it funded a major dual carriageway called the A483 bypassing Wrexham town centre and connecting it with Chester and Shrewsbury, which in turn had connections with other big cities such as Manchester and Liverpool. It also funded shops and reclaimed areas environmentally damaged by the coal industry. The town centre was regenerated and attracted a growing number of high street chain stores. However, the biggest breakthrough was the Wrexham Industrial Estate, previously used in the Second World War, which became home to many manufacturing businesses including Kellogg's, JCB, Duracell and Pirelli. It is now the fifth largest industrial estate in Europe (second in UK) by area with over 250 businesses. There are also a number of other large industrial estates in the Wrexham area, with companies such as Sharp, Brother, Cadbury, and Flexsys.
On 21 November 2012, Brother made the last British typewriter at its Wrexham factory.
Read more about this topic: History Of Wrexham
Famous quotes related to twentieth century:
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.”
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990)
“The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)