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Coordinates: 53°10'56?N 3°01'35?W? / ?53.18217, -3.02647
Hawarden (pronunciation (help·info); IPA /'h?:d?n/ "Harden"; Welsh: Penarlâg) is a town in Flintshire, north Wales, approximately 5 miles (as the crow flies) from the city of Chester. Hawarden forms part of Deeside on the Welsh/English border.
Hawarden Airport is one of two public airfields in north Wales although services are intermittent, the second being at Caernarfon. Its primary function is to serve the Raytheon and BAE Systems aerospace factories in the adjacent village of Broughton, where Airbus manufacture the wings of the Airbus airliners before they are flown in a Beluga cargo aircraft to Bremen, Germany for equipping (A330/340 & A300 Wings) or Hamburg, Germany and Toulouse, France (A320 family wings) for final assembly of the complete aircraft. The wings of the A380 Airbus are too large to be flown out, and are instead transported by barge down the river Dee, to the port of Mostyn.
Hawarden railway station is on the Borderlands Line.
Monument to William Gladstone
Hawarden's most famous residents are the former Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), who lived in Hawarden Castle -- the home of his wife's family, the Glynnes; and the professional footballer Michael Owen (b. 1979) who, although born a few miles away in Chester and thus eligible to play for England, was raised in Hawarden and lived a few miles away at Northop until his transfer to Real Madrid in the summer of 2004. He has now moved back to the area after tranferring to Newcastle United F.C., and commutes by helicopter. Owen famously bought a small street of houses for his extended family in the adjacent village of Ewloe.
Gladstone bequeathed his library, now known as St Deiniol's Library, to the town.
Near Hawarden is an area of flat land called Sealand because it was formed by silting at the head of the estuary of the river Dee.
Hawarden High School is a high school which dates back to 1606 and was attended not only by Michael Owen, but also Gary Speed, who has captained the Wales football team.
(Source: Wikipedia) |