Llanelli Star

About Llanelli Star

The Llanelli Star is a weekly regional newspaper covering the town of Llanelli and the surrounding districts of Carmarthenshire in south-west Wales. Founded in 1909, it is published in tabloid form each Wednesday by Media Wales, part of Reach plc, and its stories now appear on the WalesOnline platform. Serving an area steeped in industrial, sporting and cultural heritage, from the tinplate works and the rugby fields of Stradey Park to the Gwendraeth Valley villages, the Star has reported the life of Llanelli for well over a century.

Founding in 1909

The Llanelli Star began publication in 1909, in a town that was then one of the great industrial centres of Wales. Llanelli's economy was dominated by tinplate, steel and coal: the town was known as "Tinopolis", producing much of the world's tinplate, and its docks, railways and works employed tens of thousands. The Star was born into this confident, populist Edwardian town, and within two years it would report one of the most dramatic episodes in Welsh history, the 1911 railway strike riots, when troops shot dead two bystanders at Llanelli and an explosion killed four more. From its earliest years the paper was the town's witness to industrial triumph and tragedy alike.

Ownership: from independents to Reach

The paper's ownership history mirrors the consolidation of the British provincial press. It was owned by Llanelli Star Ltd between 1937 and 1968, then by the Northcliffe Newspaper Group from 1969 to 1973, and subsequently by South West Wales Publications, the publisher of the South Wales Evening Post. In 2012 Local World acquired Northcliffe Media, including South West Wales Publications, from the Daily Mail and General Trust, and Local World was in turn absorbed into Trinity Mirror, which rebranded as Reach plc in 2018. Today the Star is published by Media Wales, Reach's Welsh division, alongside the Western Mail, the South Wales Echo, the Daily Post and WalesOnline.

The sister paper: Carmarthen Journal

The Star's sister paper is the Carmarthen Journal, and the relationship between the two titles has shaped both. The Star was originally published on Thursdays while the Journal appeared on Wednesdays; both are now published on Wednesdays, with different formats and news content tailored to their areas. The Star covers the district of Llanelli and the Gwendraeth Valley, while the Journal covers Carmarthen town and also the Gwendraeth Valley, the two papers meeting in the former mining villages between the towns. The Journal is the more rural title, the Star the more urban, a distinction editors have long emphasised: the towns are only fifteen miles apart, but as one editor put it, they are like different worlds.

Editions across the district

At its height the Star appeared in multiple editions: the main Llanelli town edition, the Burry Port edition and the Gwendraeth Valley edition, the latter relaunched in late 2011, with coverage also extending to Llwchwr. Each edition carried news tailored to its communities, from the town centre and the villages of the Gwendraeth, including Pontyberem, Pontyates and Trimsaran, to Burry Port and Pembrey on the coast. This edition structure allowed the paper to serve distinct communities within a compact but varied patch, a classic model of the British weekly press.

Editors and newsroom history

Geoffrey Lloyd edited the Star from 1965 until his death in 1986, a twenty-one-year tenure that spanned a period of profound change in Llanelli, including the decline of the tinplate industry. Robert Lloyd later edited both the Star and the Journal jointly from 2006 before the titles regained individual editors: Bede MacGowan took the Star's chair in its centenary year of 2009, while Cathryn Ings, who had started as a trainee reporter on the Star twenty years earlier, became editor of the Journal. In December 2017 the paper's long-standing Cowell Street office in Llanelli town centre was closed, as Reach consolidated its Welsh operations, a moment that marked the end of an era for the title's physical presence in the town.

Rugby, tinplate and town identity

No account of the Star is complete without Llanelli's twin passions: industry and rugby. The paper has chronicled the town's industrial story from the peak of tinplate through the works closures to regeneration, including the transformation of the old industrial waterfront into the Millennium Coastal Park, a thirteen-mile stretch of cycleway and parkland the paper covered from conception to completion. Its sporting pages have celebrated Llanelli RFC, the Scarlets, and the legendary 1972 victory over the All Blacks at Stradey Park, "the day the pubs ran dry", when the town's team beat New Zealand 9-3 before 26,000 supporters, as well as the club's move to Parc y Scarlets in 2008. The Star's sports pages have covered generations of Llanelli football, cricket, boxing and bowls, and its community pages have recorded the chapels, choirs and eisteddfodau that define the town's cultural life.

Circulation and the digital move

The Star's ABC-audited circulation was 1,923 in 2023, reflecting the long decline of paid weekly sales, though its digital audience through WalesOnline is far larger. WalesOnline itself is one of the UK's biggest regional news websites, giving the Star's stories a potential audience far beyond Carmarthenshire. Its stories now appear on walesonline.co.uk/all-about/llanelli, Reach's Welsh digital hub, which publishes news throughout the day to an all-Wales audience. The move from a standalone llanellistar.co.uk website to the WalesOnline platform reflects Reach's group strategy of consolidating local brands onto powerful regional portals, trading some local identity for vastly greater digital reach.

Archives and historical record

The Star's archives are a vital record of twentieth-century Llanelli. Thousands of searchable pages from 1986 to 1996 are preserved in digital newspaper archives, and earlier bound volumes document the town through depression, war, nationalisation and deindustrialisation. For family historians, its birth, marriage and death notices, court reports and sports pages are indispensable; for historians of Welsh industry and labour, its reporting of strikes, closures and campaigns is a primary source. The paper's own reporting has even made history, as when it covered the 2007 rediscovery of an 1889 edition of a Victorian predecessor, the Llanelly and County Guardian.

Reading the Llanelli Star today

The Llanelli Star is published weekly in print on Wednesdays, on sale across Llanelli, Burry Port, the Gwendraeth Valley and surrounding districts, with news updated daily on the Llanelli section of WalesOnline. Readers can submit news tips, photographs, announcements and event listings, and local businesses can advertise across Media Wales's print and digital platforms. Reporting local life since 1909, the Star remains Llanelli's own newspaper, the chronicler of Tinopolis through boom, bust and rebirth.

Llanelli and the National Eisteddfod

The Star has been the local chronicler of Llanelli's appearances on Wales's biggest cultural stage. The town has hosted the National Eisteddfod, the annual festival of Welsh music, poetry and literature, on several occasions, including 1903, 1930 and 1962, each a landmark in the town's cultural history that filled the paper's pages for weeks. The eisteddfod tradition runs deep in the area: the chapels and choirs of Llanelli and the Gwendraeth Valley have produced generations of competitors, conductors and adjudicators, and the Star's coverage of local eisteddfodau, from the Urdd youth festival to village events, remains one of its most cherished community beats, connecting the industrial town to the wider cultural life of Wales.