Our History...

In 1881, 800 pupils were being educated in the National Schools in the Parish of Wrexham. The main school building was in the Beast Market (the former Dame Dorothy Jeffries Charity School). An appeal was organised by the then vicar of Wrexham, David Howell, to raise £4,000 to build a new school for boys which opened in 1885 at a total cost of £5,000. The school, situated at the top of Madeira Hill, overlooked the valley of the Gwenfro and the Parish Church. This was followed ten years later by a girls school, built between the boys school and Poplar Road at a cost of £4,363-7s-11d. The pupils of the National School for Girls in Tenters Square moved in the following year.

The National School remained a church school until 1953, when it became a Controlled School of the local authority. Following the opening of St. David’s Secondary Modern School in 1957 the senior pupils moved out of the National School which then became a Junior Mixed School. The school’s name was officially changed to St. Giles Primary School in 1959 (the name being taken from the saint to which the nearby Parish Church was dedicated).

The closure of the adjacent Drill Hall in 1968 led to the land being purchased by the local authority and converted into a school playing field. In 1988 the former boys school underwent a major re-modelling by Clwyd County Council which turned it into what we see today. A similar programme of modernisation was carried out at the infants school and the remodelled building was opened by the Bishop of St Asaph on 29 November 1990.

The adjacent house, Poplar Cottage, served as a school house for many years, and the Rev. J. Tussell, schoolmaster, is known to have died there in 1839. The building may have been a house located above a schoolroom.

Among the notable old pupils of the schools are three majors of Wrexham – Robert Roberts, Herbert Hampson and George Turner.