It was one of Cardiff's best known pubs, and a decade after it closed, progress in rebuilding The Vulcan at St Fagans Museum of National History has taken a huge step forward.
Despite being a much-loved institution of the capital, the pub - which counted members of the Manic Street Preachers 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. You can read all our latest Cardiff stories here.
Eight years later, in 2020, the museum’s specialist team began reconstructing the iconic pub at its new site on the museum grounds. Building work is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2023. It will function as a real pub and people will be able to go for a drink, but the opening date has not yet been confirmed. Today (May 10) work began to fit the roof of the pub.
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Curator of historic buildings Dafydd Wiliam, told WalesOnline there is still "plenty to be done". Once the building work is finished he said it will take a little while longer to prepare to open the building to the public. He said Covid had impacted the reconstruction "quite significantly", but now the full building team is on site and is it "moving on at such a quick pace". In terms of its similarity to the original pub, Mr Wiliam said it's "exactly the same building", with almost all the same building material as well.
"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.
Officially the Vulcan Hotel, the old Victorian boozer opened in 1853 to serve the mainly Irish community of what was then called Newtown. During its long history, it saw major changes in the city. 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.
