Siân Iles behind the scenes in our medieval collections storeroom

Hi Siân, tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Amgueddfa Cymru.

I grew up in Cardiff and trips to the Museum to view the archaeology displays at Cathays Park are a happy childhood memory for me. I was so excited to begin working at the Museum in 2008 when I joined as curatorial assistant of the medieval archaeology collections. I am now the Senior Curator responsible for this collection, which covers the period c. AD 500–1500. Prior to that I worked in an archaeology museum in Southampton, which was a wonderful experience working with material from many time periods. At Amgueddfa Cymru I love being part of a team of passionate and knowledgeable colleagues who all work hard to care for the many different aspects of the archaeology collections at Amgueddfa Cymru.

What does the responsibility of looking after our medieval collections entail on a day-to-day basis?

The role is a really varied one, which is a big part of what I love about my job! Some of my day-to-day tasks include the accessioning of archaeological materials, writing treasure and other specialist reports, answering enquiries from the public and facilitating volunteering projects focussing on our medieval archaeological collections. I also enjoy working on large projects including exhibitions.

Tell us a little about the objects and stories you’ve come across. Is there a particular object with a story that has stuck with you?

The joined tile from Neath Abbey, made from three cut pieces forming a single design.

I recently came across an odd discovery whilst working on a volunteer project to repackage and check the documentation of our medieval floor tiles. Amongst a group of tile from Neath Abbey was one was made up of three separate tiles of the same design that had been deliberately cut and stuck together. This isn’t something we would consider doing today but it gave us an interesting perspective into the curatorial practices of the past!

You mentioned our Treasure findings take up some of your time. Can you tell us more about our involvement with Treasure in Wales, and any exciting findings we have recently received?

17th-century vervel, or hawking ring, acquired by us via the Treasure process.

I’m part of a team at Amgueddfa Cymru who help administer the Treasure process in Wales. We offer advice to finders, coroners, local museums, and other interested parties on items of potential Treasure found in Wales. A large part of my treasure role is to research and write specialist reports for the medieval and post-medieval treasure cases, making recommendations to coroners who decide on whether an object or collections qualifies as Treasure.

Looking at all aspects, what do you wish our visitors knew about the work you do behind the scenes?

That the care we provide to the collections is active and continual. A key responsibility of the role of curator is provide a balance between providing access to collections with providing continued care to preserve them for future generations.

And finally, what’s your favourite piece in the Amgueddfa Cymru collection and why?

I find picking a favourite object very hard! I really enjoy working with all materials, but I particularly enjoy working with medieval ceramics – basically fragments of broken pottery and tile! I enjoy the variety of information you can glean from studying it about both the makers and the users. You can see a creative choice or moment (sometimes a fingerprint!) recorded in clay. A single action by a single person representing a single moment in time.

Sherds from 14th-century jugs found at Drybridge Park, Monmouth

Slipmats are an essential component for DJing when using vinyl. Even more so for Hip Hop DJs who also scratch or do 'turntablist’ tricks. Many, including Jaffa, found out early on that using the home hi-fi system to learn how to scratch might soon ruin your parents record collection. Rather than rubbing the vinyl against the rubber or plastic of the turntable, a slipmat allows you to move the record back and force gracefully without damage. For this reason alone it would make sense for us to include a pair of slipmats in the exhibition, but the fact that we have the first pair purchased by DJ Jaffa is a huge bonus for us.

If you’re not already engaged with the Hip Hop scene in Wales then you might not be familiar with the name, so here’s a little extra context for this particular item. As I go through some of Jaffa's history, it will relate to a few other pieces we have included in the exhibition. I’ll also explore more about the actual slipmats themselves.

Like many people in Wales and the rest of the UK, Jason Farrell, more widely known as Jaffa, first got a taste for Hip Hop after seeing the music video to Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ which showcased graffiti, breaking, scratching and rapping from New York artists. He also remembers seeing snatches of the culture on the BBC 2 show ‘Entertainment USA’ in 1983.

It wasn’t the World Famous Supreme Team DJs that he tried to emulate from the video first though, it was the Rock Steady Crew breakers. He started practicing as often as he could, both at home and school, using any pictures or clips from the television that he could find. When the ‘breakdance’ craze hit its peak after films such as ‘Beat Street’ and ‘Breakdance The Movie’ in 1984 he was already advanced for the time and entered his first proper battle against a crew from Port Talbot in Cardiff city centre.

I don’t have the space to give you Jaffa’s whole history here, but this is integral to the next stage of his development because it was after battling a crew from Bristol that he became friendly with them all and started to spend his weekends hanging out across the bridge. He would go to Wild Bunch parties and witnessed the rise of the Bristol scene, noting how the future Massive Attack members approached the art of DJing.

But it was while hanging out at St Paul’s Carnival, watching his friend Dennis Murray performing turntable tricks on the Galaxy Affair sound system, that he realised he wanted to become a DJ himself. Dennis Murray incidentally would go on to become an important pioneer of the rave movement as DJ Easygroove.

The DJ at his local Whitchurch Youth Centre would occasionally allow him to play records and as I mentioned above, he developed a way to learn scratching on the home hi-fi system, using crude homemade slipmats made of cardboard. He had to learn mostly by ear, dissecting live audio recordings of the DMC Championships, where the world’s top turntablists would compete. However, when he got his first set of professional record decks in 1986 he was able to take his DJ skills to the next level.

Of course this meant buying a proper set of slipmats. He had already been purchasing records from the Spin-Offs record shop on Fulham Palace Road in Hammersmith, West London, mostly via mail order at the time. Spin-Offs was a shop opened by New York DJ Greg James, who had moved to London to help open The Embassy night club in 1978. Greg is widely credited as being the first DJ to bring the disco style of DJing - seamlessly mixing the records together - to the UK.

Spin-Offs was also known for selling the latest DJ equipment, so it was the perfect place to find the right slipmats. Jaffa remembers that it was DJ Richie Rich who served him that day. He was a well-respected DJ at the time with his own show on Kiss FM, back when it was a pirate radio station. He also had some underground Hip Hop and Hip House hits in the 80s and 90s and started the Gee Street record label.

I’m personally intrigued that these slipmats say Mixmaster on them. There would have only been a few DJs known for the name ‘Mixmaster’ at the time. Mix Master Mike had not yet joined the Beastie Boys or started his career. Mixmaster Spade was still only making underground tapes in Compton, California. The three that come to mind around 1986 would be: Mixmaster Morris with his Mongolian Hip Hop Show on London’s Network 21 pirate radio station; Mixmaster Ice of the New York group U.T.F.O; and Mixmaster Gee And The Turntable Orchestra from Long Beach who had a couple of underground hits on MCA Records. But I’m getting slightly off tangent here.

Jaffa locked himself in his room and practiced. Eventually he was coaxed out with his decks to set them up outside Rudi’s Donut store at the Capitol Centre end of Queen Street in Cardiff. Although there were some club DJs playing Hip Hop locally at the time, such as Paul Lyons in Lloyds, this is widely viewed as the first proper Hip Hop jam in the city. Jaffa brought along a microphone which was picked up by just one rapper from Gabalfa called Dike (pron. Dee-Kay).

After that there were regular Saturday afternoon Hip Hop jams at Grassroots youth centre. Jaffa would DJ and rappers such as Dike, Mello Dee (later known as 4Dee) and MC Eric (later known as Me-One) would jump on the mic. A crew formed around them called Hardrock Concept, made up of rappers, graffiti artists and Jaffa. This was a period where collectives were more prominent than individuals, but towards the end of the 80s Jaffa and Eric would break off from the rest and move to London. A major label deal with Jive Records followed and their tracks featured on the compilations Def Reggae and Word Four under the name Just The Duce. These are both in the exhibition as well.

Jaffa eventually returned to Cardiff and Eric went on to global chart success with Technotronic. During the early 90s many people left Hip Hop behind when the rave scene exploded, but Jaffa helped to keep the culture going through his work alongside 4Dee and his sister Berta Williams (RIP) with The Underdogs – a youth organisation based in St Mellons that was focussed around developing skills such as Hip Hop dance, rapping and DJing. He has remained a cornerstone of the scene here ever since and has been involved in countless projects from Rounda Records to groups such as Tystion, Manchild, Erban Poets and Kidz With Toyz – right up to Xenith today.

He once deejayed for 70 hours, breaking the UK record for longest set, but just missing the World Record by 4 hours. He supported Snoop Dogg on his UK tour and he still DJs every weekend. He hosts the show This That & The Third on the Paris based station Radio Raptz, showcasing countless releases from Welsh artists. He has featured on various releases across the world as both a DJ and producer, including The Yellow Album from The Simpsons (his scratches are on the track ‘The Ten Commandments of Bart’ which Dike co-wrote the lyrics for).

Jaffa has also been integral in putting this exhibition together and is the main face on our posters, so it seems fitting that we should focus on his slipmats here. Hopefully, now you can see why we are so excited to include them. Do revisit this blog as we look into other items you will find in Hip Hop: A Welsh Story.

Challenge! You’ve got three days to tackle a clean of five massive rooms, open to the public seven days a week. How do you plan and undertake a conservation deep clean for reams of panelling, paintings and pots? Buff up the furniture, freshen up curtains and carpets in a mansion house built around 1580 with collections reflecting the grandeur and period of the space? Solution - with an army of skilled and specialist conservators, cleaners and volunteers, scaffolding, ladders (working at height regs noted!), brushes, vacuums, cloths, solvents, cotton wool swabs, a lot of elbow grease, stamina, enthusiasm, tea and chocolate!

At the end of June 2025, the conservation department, under the close supervision of the Senior Furniture Conservator, carried out a deep clean of the public spaces. This was carried out whilst the Castle was still open to the public.

For a successful outcome, we needed to remove the loose particulate soiling deposits retained in the hidden crevices of the furniture and fittings. This activity would have the impact of brightening the appearance of the castle display and improve the visitor experience. From a conservation perspective this annual task is a hugely important one as it removes the grime which can provide the fodder for hungry pests and mould. The presence of this grime raises a risk of biological attack on our unique collections. It also removes particulates, which in the right environmental conditions can speed up the rate of deterioration of objects in our care.

We started in the dining hall, to the right of the main entrance. We worked as a team to move objects off and from walls, decanting the smaller objects to the old servant’s hall. 

The larger objects, for example the Edwinsford Sofa, the tables and side boards, were carefully moved to the middle of the room to enable access, both the object in full and the spaces they occupy to do a thorough clean.

After three days of going up and down ladders, the fiddly brushing of fine and ornate details, lots of vacuuming and the careful application of emulsions in solution and drying oils to provide residual protection and protective layers. The clean was complete.

We hope you enjoy the finished result. The Castle is only one of more than 50 historic buildings which need a rolling programme of care and maintenance to ensure that they remain accessible to everyone.  Next time you visit the Museum, you may see our conservation and cleaning teams out in action on site. If you do, make sure you say hello. We’d be thrilled to answer any questions you have on cleaning the historic buildings and collections. 

There are two questions which have been at the forefront of my mind when curating Hip-hop: A Welsh Story for National Museum Cardiff. Firstly, ‘what is Hip Hop?’ and secondly ‘what is a museum?’ You’d think both would be relatively simple to explain but I’ve still not come up with a satisfactory answer. Yet continually searching for some kind of resolution to them both has laid the foundations for the whole project.

You’d think the former would be easier for me. I’ve followed Hip Hop since the early 80s and it forms an important part of my identity. At various moments I’ve been a rapper, a DJ, a promoter, a blogger and an artist manager, but most of all I’ve been a fan of Hip Hop culture in all of its many forms. My background is in Hip Hop, not in museums. However, I took the responsibility of bringing an exhibition like this to life incredibly seriously. To do that properly I would have to step outside of my own relationship to Hip Hop, to ensure that I was representing a cross section of the whole country. I had to investigate the many ways that Hip Hop has become a part of Welsh culture and in many cases Welsh identity. I wanted to explore and celebrate the impact that Hip Hop has had on Wales since it first arrived back in the early 80s.

Although Hip Hop was born in the 1970s, the culture really started to make an impact here from the tail end of 1982. It was easy to form a collective identity then as we only had 4 TV channels and limited print media. However Hip Hop has been through many changes since and in the age of the internet and increased globalisation, it’s not so easy to put your finger on what makes something Hip Hop.

That’s a long conversation and I'm not going to unpack that here just yet, but it was important for me to hear thoughts and experiences from as many people as possible. To make an exhibition with legitimacy we had to include voices older and younger than myself as well as my peers. I travelled across Wales and spoke to lots of people I knew and a number of others that I didn’t - in Newport, Cardiff, Port Talbot, Bridgend, Swansea, Carmarthen, Caernarfon, Aberystwyth, Bangor, Conwy, Colwyn Bay, Wrexham and many other smaller towns and villages in-between. In total there were over 70 recorded interviews - a number of which are going into the museum’s oral history archive. However I met and spoke to hundreds more people along the way and this whole project has been a huge collective effort. I also have to give a special mention to Luke Bailey who collected a number of important interviews in podcast form which were invaluable to the research.

I trawled through multiple archives to find more stories and information. Newspapers, libraries and the BBC in particular. There were a number of videos and articles that I knew existed, but most seemed to be lost forever. I spent hours looking through websites and articles on the internet and I’m grateful to Dr Kieran Nolan the founder of irishhiphop.com for finding some of the archived pages of my old website welshhiphop.com from 2000. I found some incredible pictures but years of being passed around the internet had greatly degraded the quality of them. Wild goose chases were common in trying to hunt down the originals but they all led me to find even more voices, and more stories. This inevitably led to more photos and more (objects) for us to share with you. Some people I chased around social media sites for years before I got to speak to them in person and it took time to build and maintain trust enough for them to unlock their memories and lend us their most cherished connections to the past. I often felt the weight of this huge responsibility and still do for everything that’s on display.

I started to pull out recurring themes from the interviews and conversations. Community and competition were the most common. Not that everybody recognised these within their own experiences, but enough to start building a narrative for the exhibition. There has been a common misconception that we are creating a history of Hip Hop in Wales, perhaps this is because people view museums as a place to store history and that’s arguably one part of their function. In fact a number of people didn’t want to take part at first for the simple fact that they weren’t ready to be consigned to the past. That’s certainly not what this exhibition is about and it’s not how I view museums. For me they help us to explore our identity, especially as it relates to nationality. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras this seems to have been more prescribed, but now it’s an ever-evolving discussion and I’m so pleased that Hip Hop is finally part of that conversation.

But we really are only able to scratch the surface. We’d need the whole building and then some to get close to a proper history of Hip Hop in Wales. I heard a podcast with Neil deGrasse Tyson in which he said, “The goal of a museum is to inspire you to want to learn more” and I hope we manage to do that for you. We will continue to populate this blog with more context and more information over the next few months.

I thought I knew a lot about Hip Hop in Wales when I started this project but I have learned so much along the way. We have such a rich Hip Hop history here and you can see its influence everywhere if you look closely enough. I know people are apprehensive about the way Hip Hop will be represented and believe me nobody is more nervous than me about getting things right. I’ve been grateful for such an incredible team in pulling everything together. I could never have guessed how much work goes into a museum exhibition before I started. 

We wanted to make sure this exhibition was accessible to as many people as possible but it had to be historically and academically sound as well. This meant spending hours of my own time doing my homework on Hip Hop and unpacking the many mythologies that underpin it. Books, academic papers, interviews, documentaries, articles. It’s difficult to scrutinise something you love that much but this was largely background research. In Wales we have adapted and carved our own chapter within Hip Hop’s history. We echo the wider narratives of struggle, acceptance, self expression, healthy competition and passing on the torch to the future generations that follow us. There are many stories worth telling, we have highlighted a few to create ‘Hip-hop: A Welsh Story’ and we really hope you visit and leave the exhibition as inspired as we’ve been whilst building it.

The learning team at National Waterfront Museum are always trying to help assist learners and teaching professionals to learn more about Welsh history and now they are creating audio recordings that go through the story of smelting copper in Swansea. The first recording can be found here or on SoundCloud and there will be more to follow. Be sure to look at the Learn pages for the National Waterfront Museum for learning resources. 

The Smelting Pot | Episode One | What is Copper and why Swansea became Copperopolis

Join Leisa and Rebecca from the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, to learn about what copper is and why Swansea became known as Copperopolis.

Find out more about daily life in Swansea in 1851 here