Qualla: Holyhead Maritime Museum

Holyhead Maritime Museum: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John S Turner, CC BY-SA 2.0. It is the oldest lifeboat station in Wales, or so the claim goes, and the claim has survived enough scrutiny to be worth repeating. The Newry Beach boathouse was built in 1858 by Forrestt of Limehouse for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, three years after the RNLI took over from the local Anglesey Association for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck. It served as a working lifeboat station for ninety-one years, until a new boathouse and slipway opened on Salt Island in 1949. Then it sat. By the time Stena Line, the Swedish ferry company that runs the Dublin route out of Holyhead, owned the land in the 1990s, the building was in decline and a more profitable future was being planned around it. The maritime museum survived because Stena offered the building back at a peppercorn rent, the Heritage Lottery Fund paid for the refit, and the lease was renegotiated to ninety-nine years.

Read more: Holyhead Maritime Museum on Qualla

Image: John S Turner | CC BY-SA 2.0

Holyhead Maritime Museum: The First Boats and the First Crews

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phil Williams, CC BY-SA 2.0. The 1858 station opened with an unnamed Peake-class self-righting lifeboat that launched eighteen times and saved 128 people in its working life. Its replacement, Prince of Wales, launched 38 times and rescued another 128. Then in 1875 came the Thomas Fielden - paid for by the Ma...

Read more: Holyhead Maritime Museum on Qualla

Image: Phil Williams | CC BY-SA 2.0

Holyhead Maritime Museum: Stena, the Heritage Lottery, and Ninety-Nine Years

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. When the original lease expired and negotiations for a place in a new harbour development collapsed, the museum's future looked thin. Stena Line stepped in. The Swedish ferry company, the largest operator at the Port of Holyhead, offered the museum the renovated lifeboat house at...

Read more: Holyhead Maritime Museum on Qualla

Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Holyhead Maritime Museum: Holyhead at War

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 瑞丽江的河水, CC BY-SA 4.0. Next door to the main museum, in a Second World War air-raid shelter that has somehow survived demolition, the museum runs a separate exhibition called Holyhead at War. The shelter itself is the artefact - a low concrete bunker built to protect townspeople from the German bombing...

Read more: Holyhead Maritime Museum on Qualla

Image: 瑞丽江的河水 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Holyhead Maritime Museum: What the Collections Hold

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phil Williams, CC BY-SA 2.0. The museum's collections include artefacts from Captain John Macgregor Skinner, the American-born master of Holyhead packet ships who was washed overboard and drowned in 1832, and for whom the town built an obelisk that still stands. There are objects from the Royal Yacht Mary, t...

Read more: Holyhead Maritime Museum on Qualla

Image: Phil Williams | CC BY-SA 2.0