West Wales Museum of Childhood

The West Wales Museum of Childhood stood in Llangeler, Carmarthenshire, beside the River Teifi valley. It lay near Newcastle Emlyn along the A484, the main road between Carmarthen and Cardigan. The building sat close to the Welsh National Woollen Museum at Drefach Felindre. It opened in 2005 as a private museum with no outside funding. The collection has since moved to Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. The museum held over ten thousand items spread across five galleries. Visitors saw toys, dolls, model trains and cars, teddy bears, toy soldiers, costumes, pinball machines and games. A period schoolroom showed how children once learned. Household items from past decades were also on display. The museum gained official accreditation under VisitWales VAQAS. The exhibits gave a clear picture of childhood through the ages. Photos of many pieces remain on the People’s Collection Wales website. The site once drew visitors interested in Welsh social history. Its closure left a gap in local museum provision. The collection now forms part of a new home in England.