The actor Rob McElhenney, reclining and bare-chested, gives a come-hither look as you enter the Tŷ Pawb (“Everybody’s House”) art gallery/market in Wrexham, Wales. McElhenney, famously, co-owns Wrexham football club with Ryan Reynolds and, clearly, you can’t get away from their glamour in this small city. I’ve only just got out of the taxi and here they are.
This is my first visit in years to the place where I was born. My earliest memories are set in these redbrick streets: standing on a carnival float costumed as an astronaut, going to the cinema for the first time to see Sleeping Beauty, visiting a cafe in the High Street for a rum baba. Later on, my dad would find me asleep in my seat in Wrexham football club’s Racecourse Ground, in the year we’d got season tickets in a final attempt to fill me with a love of The Game. It was money wasted – doubly so as he was an Everton fan.
Now there is the new legend of Wrexham AFC. The drawing at the gallery entrance was a recent birthday present from Reynolds to McElhenney. Reynolds claimed to have sent a sub to the wreck of the Titanic to find the Wrexham Lager it’s said to have carried onboard. Instead, it retrieved this portrait – which bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Kate Winslet in Titanic. I am starting to wonder if, instead of returning to the town of my birth (it only became a city in 2022), I have entered a utopian fantasy Wales, possibly created from the imagination of Russell T Davies.
This witty, anonymous artwork hangs above a sculpted sheep daubed with the words Croeso i Wrecsam, “Welcome to Wrexham”, the title of the Disney TV series that documents how two Hollywood stars revitalise a football team and a community. That new Wrexham, however, is not just about football. It’s also, I find, about fashion, art and good chicken korma.
We start with the korma, at one of the long tables where you can sit and have your lunch at this cultural venue, which is also a working market. Nostalgia is a deeply wired human habit: if I’ve ever been prone to it, visiting my old home town/city is a great cure. Because this place is so much better than I remember. At one of the market stalls, Brendan Griffiths has a business called House of Retro. Surely he’s able to talk up the old days, given he trades in them with his stock of old computer games. But Griffiths, clad in the team’s red colour, philosophises about old Wrexham realistically. Jo Marsh, creative director of Tŷ Pawb, asks him how he would characterise the place in the 1980s? “Rough!”
That was how it felt to me, too, when I was at the huge comprehensive sixth-form college Yale, where my father was vice principal. On one occasion, we students filled the Racecourse bar for a party. Was everyone above the legal drinking age? I don’t remember. Before that, at my secondary school in an outlying village, there were some lads from the dying mining communities who were so hard they chased teachers around the classrooms. Once with a garden fork.
Griffiths mocks people who think Wrexham was better or more real in those days – some, apparently, even wax lyrical over a demolished flyover. There was a teenage fad in the 80s for smashing windows, he recalls – just going out on a Saturday night to break some glass for a laugh. “People today say kids spend too much time playing games on screen, and they probably do, but at least they’re not out smashing windows!”
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As well as running House of Retro, Griffiths is involved in Wrexfest, a regenerative cultural jamboree with DJs, bands and talks. He’s pleased that Wrexham will soon stage its first Pride: “Probably the last city in the country, but at least it’s coming.” At another stall, I meet Mohamad Al Wahid, who is looking after his mother Rokaya’s tailoring and dressmaking business. She comes originally from Lebanon and he was born in Syria. The dresses are so beautiful I am tempted to buy one.
These people are not living artworks, obviously, yet the real life of the market seems sprinkled with the fairy dust of creativity from its connected art venue. And vice versa. In fact, the art exhibition I am specifically here to see is by former fashion designer Liaqat Rasul, who recreates a market stall at the centre of his show. Rasul makes art that explores the garment trade and cross-cultural migrations in a retrospective that’s also a homecoming to the town where he was born and learned his craft, as a window-dresser for his family business.
“My dad came from Pakistan to Newcastle and worked in a factory,” he tells me. But he was drawn to market stalls and ended up working at “the Butter Market”, the old indoor market. “Then we set up our own business and called it Guys and Dolls. I was 13 when my dad bought a shop on Duke Street, and we did really well – it was 80s fashion. That was all about spending money.”
I was instantly drawn to the press release for Rasul’s show. He’s an artist who was born in Wrexham but has spent his career in London, Delhi and elsewhere. As a born Wrexhamian myself, I thought, why not make his homecoming mine, too? I also like his self-identification as a “Dyslexic Gay Welsh Pakistani artist”.
Rasul turned his youthful experiences into the multicultural style that launched his fashion career in the late 1990s. This show includes his graduation dress, a cocktail of western and south Asian traditions that was bought by Liberty. Now he applies that same collage aesthetic to artworks that explore his Punjabi heritage and life in multicultural Britain. His market-stall sculpture is emblazoned with symbols of the Punjab region, which includes parts of north-west India and Pakistan.
“Punjab is where the ancient civilisation of Harappa was. Do you know the meaning of Punjab? Panj, five, and then ab, river – so five rivers. I love this idea of these five rivers that evolved from ancient times and created fertile lands. Punjabi culture is really interwoven into British society.”
One place I wouldn’t associate with this cultural complexity, not in a million years, was Wrexham. This town in the early 1980s was not only rough – with regular fights in the anything but gentrified pubs – but virtually monoracial. Just a few years later, Rasul was part of a pioneering community. “There were three Pakistani families back then. We all lived in one cul-de-sac. In some ways, we were quite exotic, a very, very tightknit community.”
There were no venues like the one we’re in, either in his Wrexham or mine. There was the library, he points out: “I used that library a lot, I would take out three or four books a week. I’m dyslexic, so I find reading quite difficult, so I would take picture books out. But I loved sitting in the library.”
I liked Wrexham library, too. I remember borrowing Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe in the summer before heading off to start a history degree in south-east England, so the library can’t have been too bad. The book was a pioneering exploration of the rituals of carnival. Now here at Tŷ Pawb I find carnival has come at last to Wrexham. That embracing name Tŷ Pawb reminds me of James Joyce’s carnivalesque declaration in Finnegans Wake: “Here Comes Everybody.”
Do I miss the old Wrexham? Not for a second. But I love what it’s becoming. Finally, Liaqat, Jo, the exhibition’s curator Lewis Dalton Gilbert and I go up to Tŷ Pawb’s roof garden to see Wrexham from above. There’s the curvy roof of the swimming pool and the 16th-century spire of the parish church. All around them, the city looks leafy under the sun-warmed sky. Did I overlook something here when I was younger? Probably.