When was st asaph made a city

Denbighshire council leader councillor Huw Evans said: "St Asaph is a town with a lot of history and I'm very please that it's been given city status. St Asaph hit the headlines last September when more than people signed a petition calling for the removal of a newly installed sculpture in tribute to the local links of Victorian explorer HM Stanley.

Petition wants sculpture removed. St Asaph community website. It was granted a royal charter by the Queen in St Asaph business park provides jobs for 2, people in over 60 premises. Published 14 March The whole business is now confused and confusing.

On the one side, it is said that that the conferment of city status is purely ceremonial, and a mark of respect. On the other hand, places like Rochester, can lose their status following local government reorganisation. Its successor authority, Medway, was among those which recently applied for designation — unsuccessfully.

In Wales, old cathedral cities, such as Bangor and perhaps for reasons of sentiment St Davids have not been required to re-apply. In their case, if not in Rochester, also a cathedral city, once a city, it seems, always a city. Why do citizens and their councils want the status? It seems that today, in most cases, they believe that conferment will bring economic benefits.

Even St Asaph hopes for more tourists. It is said that Sunderland, made a city in , is now much more prosperous as a result. If that were the case, Wrexham should have tried harder. It should have have avoided half-baked gimmicks that purported to have taken the democratic temperature. On the other hand, Professor Bernie Callaghan, head of business and law at Sunderland University, says that no research has been done to show whether city status was influential or not in the recent transformation of Sunderland.

Doubtless it played a small part, but surely general movements in the UK economy are likely to have been more important. St Asaph may achieve a small increase in the , tourists who visit every year, but surely not a significant one.

Having failed twice, Wrexham may now decide to let the matter rest for a generation, and some might argue that this would be no bad thing. Foolish mistakes notwithstanding, the whole system of choosing which places should be designated appears to be arbitrary, almost a matter of which one catches the attention of the civil servants.

How otherwise, were applications from such places as Reading, Middlesbrough and Medway spiked? The very least that we should be asking for is a new look at the criteria. They should go back to the proverbial drawing board. There is plenty for Wrexham to shout about, historically, educationally, culturally, and economically.

What now needs to happen is the nurture of some genuine urbanity , and an authentic conversation among its citizens about the feeling and identity of the place. One-off opinion polls should be shelved for the foreseeable future. This is a sore point: in its own mind, St Asaph has been a city for as long as anyone can remember.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica refers to it as such. But in the s came the bitter discovery that it had no city deeds or a charter, despite numerous references, including a plaque on the cathedral wall trumpeting the erection of the street lamps "of this city", in , marking Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. With local councillor Denise Hodgkinson, Mr Thomas has set matters right after 12 years of trying — the first of three applications coming at the millennium.

The second came at the Queen's Golden Jubilee in We don't have anyone paid to do this; it was all our own work. The city does not lack claims to fame. Despite these treasures, it's hard to dismiss the argument that once you look past the cathedral, which sits atop the narrow high street overlooking the river Elwy below, a bank and five pubs, it doesn't have a huge amount to say for itself.

Nevertheless, on the high street the new accolade is greeted with a crouching ovation. I hope it means we get a new bypass," says Daniel Owen, He has more pressing concerns. Huw Jones's sons Sion, nine, and Ellis, eight, do not understand the fuss.