Birth of a Town

It all began when William & Benita Rees moved to Llanelli and tried to find out when their new home was built. A visit to the local library revealed that, although, many excellent books, booklets, and articles had been published on Llanelli, none, at that time, covered the complete history from ancient times to modern day. That was about eight years ago. As they became fascinated with the town’s colourful past, they hoped to produce a small book entitled Llanelli Ancient & Modern but were overtaken by events when the material they had gathered grew to enormous proportions and any possibility of producing a book in the traditional sense at a reasonable cost flew out of the window.

On hearing of the problem ARTdesigns stepped into the picture and offered to collaborate with the Authors and produce the work on a CD in Adobe PDF format, a format which retains the original page layout and which can be viewed on any PC with Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. As most PCs already have this software (or it may be downloaded free from http://www.adobe.com) this seemed an ideal solution.

It took a further two years to edit, undertake photo-shoots and transform material into its present form. The work consists of over 2,300 A4-sized pages, all in colour. The sections are bookmarked for easy reference and the whole CD is fully searchable. This Website only shows a miniscule amount of what is included.

Support has been given by many organisations such as Dyfed-Powys Police, Mid & West Wales Fire Brigade, Carmarthenshire County Council, the Public Record Office, Carmarthenshire's Museums & Library Service, the Post Office, large commercial organisations such as Banks and too many private individuals to mention here. Some have provided material, others have allowed us to use their copyrighted material. Without their combined help this project would never have got off the ground.

It is not possible to show individual page layouts due to web page formatting restrictions so only brief extracts are given, along with some illustrations to whet the appetite. Not all sections are included here.

The CD has been produced as a Limited Edition on a first-come first-served basis.

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