St Fagans National Museum of History is looking for a brewery to supply a beloved Cardiff pub that is being rebuilt there. The Vulcan Hotel, which once stood on Adam Street near the city centre, is currently being reconstructed in the museum grounds after it was dismantled in 2012.
Work to rebuild the old Victorian boozer, which opened in 1853, started in 2020 and it is set to open to the public in 2024 - functioning as a real pub where people will be able to go for a drink. Now Amgueddfa Cymru, the Welsh Government-sponsored charity which is comprised of seven national museums including St Fagans, says it's looking for a brewery to "create and supply a bespoke range of draught and bottled beers" to be sold at the pub when it opens.
Publishing a notice for a supplier earlier this month, it invited breweries to be "part of The Vulcan's story" in a tweet. It added that the beers will be sold alongside a wider retail range and across the gift shops and online stores of its seven museums.
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Invitations to tender are now open and the deadline for receipt of completed tenders is July 14. A spokesperson for Amgueddfa Cymru told WalesOnline that a more specific opening date has not yet been set yet for The Vulcan Hotel.
The exterior is mostly complete, but there is still lots of work to be done on the interior before the public is welcome through the doors. When it first opened, the Vulcan Hotel served the mainly Irish community of what was then called Newtown.
During its long history, it saw major changes in the city - including the demolition of Newtown in 1970 and the growth of Cardiff into an industrial powerhouse and eventually the nation's capital. Despite being a much-loved institution of the city, the pub - which counted members of the Manic Street Preachers and actor Rhys Ifans among its customers - faced demolition for decades.
In 2009 around 5,000 people signed a petition to keep open the pub, but it finally closed its doors in 2012, and was taken down brick by brick from Adam Street in Adamsdown before being relocated to the museum. The Vulcan reconstruction will emulate its appearance in 1915. This was an important year for the pub - it had just undergone a major refurbishment that saw its distinctive green and brown tiles added to the frontage, as well as a redesign of its interior.
Amgueddfa Cymru's curator of historic buildings Dafydd Wiliam previously told WalesOnline that the pub will be "exactly the same building" as the original, with almost all the same building material. "We were very fortunate to have access to all of the building plans from 1901. So we're very familiar with the changes that the building has undergone. We surveyed the building as it stood in 2012 just before taking it down. So bringing these all together, this is a millimetre accurate representation of the building that we took down and people are familiar with," he said.
He added that there are a couple of small changes to make the building safer than it was, such as new, more robust roof trusses, as the old ones were too thin. "In the same way," he continued, "because The Vulcan was part of a terrace, its two side walls were really thin, and in fact they were only 4in thick, because the bricks used were laid on their edge. So obviously we've strengthened that as well."
The original tiles on the front of the building, some of which were heavily cracked and chipped, were also not fit to be re-used but the company that made them in 1914 is still going and have remade the tiles using the original moulds used over a century ago.
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