: Museums, Exhibitions and Events

While The National Waterfront Museum’s GRAFT team and volunteers cannot gather to garden the Museum’s courtyard garden at this time, they are nonetheless keeping busy setting up ‘Seeds Out in the Community’ and encouraging us all to grow sunflowers in visible and public spaces to show support for key workers. Here’s a little more about this innovative community project and how it’s grown from a seed of an idea to a flourishing project that grows plants, food and people.

GRAFT: a soil based syllabus is the National Waterfront Museum's edible land and educational project, and a permanent piece of green infrastructure within Swansea City Centre. The project is also a socially engaged work of art by artist Owen Griffiths, and was originally commissioned as part of Now the Hero / Nawr Yr Arwr in 2018 funded by 1418NOW as part of a huge UK wide cultural project commemorating the first World War.

GRAFT works with community groups from a wide range of backgrounds across the city who came together, to transform the Museum's once industrial courtyard into a beautiful, sustainable, organic growing environment; creating an edible landscape to encourage participation and conversation around land use, food and sustainability in an accessible and empowering way.

Owen and Senior Learning Officer Zoe Gealy develop the ongoing program at GRAFT around these ideas of collaboration, sustainability and community. Every Friday, (other than during this lockdown), volunteers young and old work alongside one another to share skills working in wood and metal, learning how to grow plants, gaining qualifications and supporting each other along the way. The project has seen successful apprenticeships develop as a result of its program as well as seeing the long-term mental health benefits of working outside together. New friendships are formed, and people, as well as plants, flourish. During GRAFT’s development, in addition to raised beds, a pergola and benches from local timber, a cob pizza oven and beehives have been introduced to the garden. GRAFT's youngest volunteers come from Cefn Saeson School in Neath and work with Alyson Williams, the resident Beekeeper, learning about biodiversity, the environment and working together to care for the bees.

Some of the produce grown in the garden usually makes its way into delicious meals at the Museum's café whilst some is used for community meals at GRAFT. A portion of produce is used by volunteers, and some is donated to projects and groups throughout the area who provide food for those in need, such as Matts House, Ogof Adullam and the Swansea refugee drop in centre.

SPREADING SEEDS AND SUNSHINE DURING LOCKDOWN

Over the coming weeks GRAFT will be posting seeds through City and County of Swansea’s food parcel scheme and to community groups they regularly work with such as Roots Foundation and CRISIS. The seeds include squash and sunflowers, which were harvested by the gardeners last season.

Another initiative GRAFT is developing in the coming weeks is encouraging people to plant sunflowers in visible and public spaces, to show support for key workers alongside rainbow paintings. People are also invited to post pictures of their successful growing on GRAFT’s social media pages.

To request seeds contact zoe.gealy@museumwales.ac.uk

07810 657170

During lock-down, the GRAFT garden continues to need some tending and so  The National Waterfront Museum's on-site team are watering the GRAFT garden and seedlings during their daily shifts.

With thanks to players of the People’s Postcode Lottery for supporting Amgueddfa Cymru’s public programme of activities and events.

FOLLOW GRAFT:

www.facebook.com/graft.a.soil.based.syllabus

INSTAGRAM: Graft____

Are you learning Welsh? This is a short conversation introducing the Fron Haul houses. This conversation is suitable for higher level learners.

We may be in lockdown, but nature continues to thrive, plants continue to need tending and borders weeding. Just as the nation is tending to its gardens, so are the Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales Historic Gardens Unit team, albeit at a reduced working schedule. Here, Juliet Hodgkiss who maintains St Fagans’ beautiful and varied gardens shares a little about what’s going on there.

To keep safe and maintain distance during the pandemic, each of our team are working one day a week to do essential gardening.  With only one gardener in at any one time we are in total isolation, keeping both ourselves and others safe.  One of the most important jobs we have to do is the planting and maintenance of our collection of heritage potato varieties. These potatoes were donated to the Museum over twenty years ago by the Scottish Agricultural Science Agency. As a living object, these potatoes must be grown every year to produce seed potato for the following year. Our collection includes the Lumper, the potato grown at the time of the Irish potato famine, which we grow in Nant Wallter and Rhyd-y-car gardens. We also grow Yam, Myatt’s Ashleaf, Skerry Blue and Fortyfold, all varieties from the 18th and 19th century.

This winter we had a great time planting many new trees in the Gardens, to replace lost trees, add new interest for the visitors and for attracting wildlife. We’ve added four new mulberry trees to the Mulberry Lawn, several species of hawthorn, rowan trees and Berberis shrubs to the terrace banks, three whitebeam, a katsura tree, a snakebark maple and a snowy mespilus by the ponds, crab apples to the Castle Orchard and a variety of native species for future coppicing. While we’re enjoying the warm, dry spring, it does mean that all these new trees need a lot of watering to keep them alive. Many are planted a long distance from the nearest tap, so have to be watered with watering cans.

We are also keeping the plants in our greenhouses and nursery alive. We have many plants which are either rare or unique to St Fagans.  These include two offspring of our fern-leaved beech and seedlings from a pine which was lost in a storm a few years ago. These require daily watering this time of year. Spring is the time of year we replant our beds and borders, filling the gaps left by plants lost over winter. We didn’t get around to planting all the plants we ordered over the winter months before the lockdown, so we’re keeping these plants alive while trying to get as many as possible in the ground, with our greatly reduced staff.

The Vulcan Hotel was first registered as an ‘ale house’ in 1853. By the time it was dismantled by the Museum in 2012 it had seen several phases of alterations. The scale of the 1901 and 1914 alterations required approval by the County Planning Authority and these plans are held today by the Glamorgan Archives. Further work was undertaken in 1925 and 1941.

The planning application from 1914 features two drawings of the façade (the 1901 application doesn’t show the façade). A drawing in black and white was labelled ‘At present’ while a drawing in colour was labelled ‘Proposed’. No written text survives to accompany the drawings, but careful study can shed more light on the proposed changes. The most obvious alteration was the number of windows on the first floor was increased from two to four, which were flanked by new, raised pilasters of red brick. The parapet fronting the roof, depicted as a series of horizontal lines above the windows was removed, the chimneys were altered, and the roof was tiled in new, grey slate. Another change - which is quite subtle on these drawings - is the most dramatic in The Vulcan’s history. The whole building was increased in height. The drawing labelled ‘At present’ shows a roof of the same height as its neighbours, while the drawing labelled ‘Proposed’ shows The Vulcan being taller than those either side of it.

The configuration of the ground floor façade remained unchanged – two doorways and two windows, each divided into two large panes with fanlights above. Looking closely, however, there are several key differences which suggest that they are in fact, two different facades. The ‘At present’ drawing depicts two fielded panels under each window, while the ‘Proposed’ drawing has only one. The number of door panels are different. The pilasters on either side of the windows, depicted in the ‘At present’ drawing, are fluted and stop short of the frieze, while the pilasters in the ‘Proposed’ drawing aren’t fluted and continue through the frieze to the cornice above. There are seven fanlights above each windowpane in the ‘At present’ drawing, while the ‘Proposed’ drawing shows only three. The decorative finial above the cornice was removed and last but not least, only the ‘proposed’ drawing features the inscriptions THE VULCAN HOTEL, WINES & SPIRITS and ALES & STOUT.

Although not made clear by the plans, we assume that the drawing labelled ‘Present’ depicts a ground floor façade made of timber - just like a traditional Victorian shop front - and that the façade proposed in 1914 was of glazed earthenware tiles - which remained in place until 2012.

Like so many events during these unprecedented times, our Quarrymen exhibition was curtailed last month when Waterfront Museum closed its doors for lockdown. We wanted to find a way to continue to share it with you, so here’s some background to the exhibition by Carwyn Rhys Jones, who developed it. In it speaks about how it came about and how it was shaped by the stories and memories of five quarrymen. We’ve illustrated this with images from the exhibition and hope you enjoy the experience.

I began this project as a development of some work I’d previously done at university about the landscape of quarries. The project included some quarries in North Wales including Parys Mountain, Dorothea, Penrhyn, Alexandra and Oakeley. It focussed on how the natural landscape had changed due to industrialisation and how a new landscape formed around the quarries. The natural next step was to look at the people of the quarries. Sadly, few quarrymen remain, so it became timely to capture and record this important history and heritage.

Ideas for this project were driven by the quarrymen I interviewed, so it was only fitting that it would be titled Chwarelwyr which means Quarrymen. The exhibition is formed of two key parts: a short documentary and photography stills to accompany it with. The first quarrymen I interviewed was based in Trefor. He was known locally as Robin Band due to the fact that most of his family were in bands. He worked in the stone quarry of Trefor for a few years, and shared fantastic memories of the good, bad and humorous times there.

The next was Dic Llanberis, which, as his name suggests, was based in Llanberis. Dic had years of experience and so much knowledge about the history of the Dinorwic quarry. I used the same process for each of the five quarrymen, interviewing, filming and then photographing them. Dic worked at the quarry even after it had closed down in 1969, helping to clear the remaining slate.

Then it was the turn of Andrew JonJo and Carwyn. They had both worked at Penrhyn quarry in Bethesda on the outskirts of Bangor. I interviewed them both at the National Slate Museum in Llanberis where they both now work. Andrew is the last of six generations of quarrymen in his family that had all worked in two quarries: Dinorwic and Penrhyn. As you might imagine, he spoke movingly of how he was bread into the industry. Carwyn also comes from a large quarrying family, some of them had worked at the slate hospital in Llanberis for injured quarrymen. A number of his ancestors’ signatures can be found in the slate hospital museum’s books, recording surgical procedures.

Finally, I met up with John Pen Bryn, based in Talysarn just outside of Caernarfon. This quarry was so large that it contained a village, and John had been raised there. He now owns the quarry and has lived in Talysarn all his life. He showed me around the quarry and where the village used to be – difficult to imagine now that it was once a bustling place with three shops, within the quarry. John was full of stories and knew everything that had happened in his quarry over the years.

Sadly, both Robin Band and Dic Llanberis have passed away since completing the exhibition, and so the film that accompanies it finishes with their images. They, and I are very glad that we managed to capture some of their stories and document this important heritage and history just in time. I am very grateful to all who were involved in making this exhibition possible. I hope you enjoy it.