National Slate Museum Unlocking the living gateway to Wales’s slate story

Putting the voice of local communities at the heart of a multimillion-pound redevelopment project

In November 2024, the National Slate Museum in Llanberis, North Wales, closed its doors to begin an ambitious multimillion-pound redevelopment project supported by National Lottery Heritage Fund, the UK Government via Gwynedd Council, the Welsh Government and other funders.

Some 13,000 collections have been temporarily relocated to allow for conservation and access improvements and the creation of new visitor facilities. Our aim is to create a world-class gateway to the Slate Landscapes of Northwest Wales, a Unesco World Heritage Site.

Determined to involve communities in shaping the redevelopment, we have taken the museum beyond the walls, establishing temporary locations at Caernarfon, Llanberis and Penrhyn Castle, as well as a new open-access collections store near Bangor. These are anchor points for a conversation with the wider community on the stories we tell, the objects that resonate, and new perspectives.

We are working together with our communities to build a living museum experience. Our new characters, Margaret the Matron and Gwen the Maid, were co-developed with local schools. Margaret reveals the harsh realities of quarry life, while Gwen explores the strain of serving a quarry owner while her family suffers. These characters, and others, will form a core part of the museum experience when we reopen.

Volunteers are working with us in many ways, such as researching marginalised and hidden histories of the industry or working on the restoration of our much-loved locomotive, Una.

There are many other projects, such as Cyffwrdd (meaning “to touch”), where we’re using a newly developed sensory collection to engage with people living with dementia, and a hospital-based creative wellbeing and memory project.

The legacy of this engagement work will weave community narratives into all aspects of the visitor experience, creating a museum that is not only an international beacon for Wales but also of its community and for its community.