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Museum of Welsh Life

St Fagans National Museum of History
Sain Ffagan: Amgueddfa Werin Cymru
St Fagans castle - Cardiff - geograph.org.uk - 1458954.jpg
St Fagans Castle in its grounds
St Fagans National Museum of History is located in Cardiff
St Fagans National Museum of History
Location in Cardiff, Wales
Former name St Fagans National History Museum
Established 1948
Location St Fagans, Cardiff, Wales
Coordinates 51°29′13″N 3°16′21″W / 51.4869°N 3.2725°W / 51.4869; -3.2725Coordinates: 51°29′13″N 3°16′21″W / 51.4869°N 3.2725°W / 51.4869; -3.2725
Visitors 610,155 (2010)
* Ranked 21st in the UK
Website http://museum.wales/stfagans/

St Fagans National Museum of History (Welsh: Sain Ffagan: Amgueddfa Werin Cymru), commonly referred to as St Fagans after the village where it is located, is an open-air museum in Cardiff chronicling the historical lifestyle, culture, and architecture of the Welsh people. The museum is part of the wider network of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.

It consists of more than forty re-erected buildings from various locations in Wales, and is set in the grounds of St Fagans Castle, an Elizabethan manor house. In 2011 Which? magazine named the museum the United Kingdom's favourite visitor attraction.

The museum was started in 1946 following the donation of the castle and lands by the Earl of Plymouth. It opened its doors to the public in 1948, under the name of the Welsh Folk Museum. The museum's name in Welsh (also meaning "Welsh Folk Museum") has remained unchanged since that date, whereas the English title was modified to Museum of Welsh Life, thereafter St Fagans National History Museum, and again to its current nomenclature.

The brainchild of Iorwerth Peate, the museum was modelled on Skansen, the outdoor museum of vernacular Swedish architecture in . Most structures re-erected in Skansen were built of wood and are thus easily taken apart and reassembled, but a comparable museum in Wales was going to be more ambitious, as much of the vernacular architecture of Wales is made of masonry.

The museum includes more than forty buildings which represent the architecture of Wales, including a nonconformist chapel (in this case, Unitarian), a village schoolhouse, a Toll road tollbooth (below), a cockpit (below), a pigsty (below), and a tannery (below).


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