St Giles' Church on the High Street has the tallest medieval church tower in Wales - 41 metres of richly decorated late-Gothic stonework, completed in the early 16th century. The 18th-century rhyme of the Seven Wonders of Wales lists it alongside Snowdon and the bells of Gresford. Inside, a colourful ceiling of flying musical angels hangs over the nave. The chapel of the Royal Welch Fusiliers holds regimental memorial books. In the graveyard sits the tomb of Elihu Yale, born in Boston in 1649 to a family that returned to Wrexham when he was three. He made a fortune as a British East India Company official in Madras, returned to Britain, and in 1718 donated books, textiles and a portrait of King George I to a struggling Connecticut college called the Collegiate School. The college renamed itself Yale in his honour. He died in 1721 in London and was buried at St Giles. To return the symbolism, Yale University built a scaled-down replica of the St Giles tower on its New Haven campus. The Welsh Yale-family seat - Plas yn Iâl in Denbighshire - is the source of that name. A 1611 first-edition King James Bible turned up in a parish cupboard at St Giles in 2015, undisturbed for centuries.

From the late 18th century onwards Wrexham was the centre of the North-east Wales coalfield - by 1913 producing up to three million tonnes a year and employing more than 10,000 men. The collieries were among the great industrial enterprises of Britain. The 22 September 1934 explosion and fire at Gresford Colliery killed 266 men. Most of the bodies were never recovered; they remain sealed underground. The brass-band march written in mourning, William Hayes's slow lament for Gresford, became the standard music of British mining grief, played at every disaster since. Wrexham's water supplies also made it the first British town to brew lager. Wrexham Lager opened in 1882 - founded by German brewers - and produced beer in the continental style decades before lager was widely drunk anywhere in Britain. Brewing, leather, tanning, brickworks, steel: the city's 19th-century industrial profile was extraordinarily varied. Long before the industries, Acton Hall on the city's edge was the seat of George Jeffreys, the Hanging Judge of the Bloody Assizes after Monmouth's Rebellion, whose name still raises temperatures in west-country pubs.

Wrexham AFC was founded on 4 October 1864 at the Turf Tavern, by members of the local cricket club who wanted winter sport for the young men of the town. Their first game was played on 22 October at the Denbighshire County Cricket Ground - later renamed the Racecourse Ground - against ten men of the Prince of Wales Fire Brigade. The club is the oldest in Wales and the third-oldest professional football club in the world. The Racecourse is the world's oldest international football stadium still hosting internationals. The Football Association of Wales was founded in a meeting at the Wynnstay Arms on Yorke Street in 1876. For most of the next century the club was an unremarkable lower-league outfit. Then in November 2020 the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, through their R.R. McReynolds Company LLC, announced a takeover backed by 98.6 percent of the Wrexham Supporters Trust vote. The deal completed in February 2021. The Welcome to Wrexham documentary on FX began streaming in 2022. Promotion to League Two came in 2023, League One in 2024, the Championship in 2025 - three consecutive promotions, a first in English Football League history. Both owners were granted Freedom of the City on 10 April 2023. The Reynolds memorial park - Ryan Rodney Reynolds park - was officially announced on 23 October 2023.

Saint Richard Gwyn, a Wrexham Recusant schoolteacher and Welsh-language poet, was convicted of treason for his Catholic faith and hanged, drawn and quartered at the town's Beast Market on 15 October 1584. He was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, and the relic of Saint Richard Gwyn rests in the Roman Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Sorrows on Regent Street. His Feast Day is 17 October. The cathedral was built in 1857. From 1898 to 1987 it was home to the Bishop of Menevia, whose diocese covered all of Wales; after the 1987 reorganisation of the Welsh Catholic province it became home to the Bishop of Wrexham. The same city that produced a 16th-century martyr also produced T. H. Parry-Williams, who at the 1912 National Eisteddfod held here became the first poet to win both the Chair and the Crown in the same year - a feat almost unheard of in Welsh literary culture. Wrexham received city status in 2022 as part of the civic honours marking the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II, after three previous unsuccessful bids in 2000, 2002 and 2012. The city is twinned with Märkischer Kreis in Germany and Racibórz in Poland - the Polish link forged through Penley Polish Hospital, where Free Polish servicemen wounded in the Second World War were treated, and where many of their descendants still live in the area.