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Description
Creator: Francis Bedford (1816 - 1894)
Date: c. 1880
Format: Albumen print
Collection: National Media Museum Collection
Inventory no: 1990-5037_B1_0088
Along the Promenade and north from the King’s Hall shops and flats, Nos. 32-4 Marine Terrace are stuccoed and marked on John Wood’s plan of 1834; the detail, however, is almost certainly all mid-Victorian. The north end group, Nos. 57-62, up to the former Queen’s Hotel, is of ca. 1868.
On the shore, just south of the Queen’s Hotel, was the nineteenth-century Public Bath, built in 1810 and demolished in 1892. The former Queen’s Hotel was designed by architects Hayward and Davis in a ‘Hôtel de Ville’ style and built by George Lumley of Aberystwyth for the Hafod Hotel Company or Mid Wales Hotel Company. It was opened in 1866. The plans were signed by Davis, and the hotel is contemporary with, though more stolid than, Hayward’s Duke of Cornwall hotel in Plymouth, lacking the virtuoso roofscape of the Plymouth building. The 'Cambrian News' published visitor lists during the summer months and noted that the 83-bedroom hotel had special ground-floor provision for the infirm. Quartz and ore panels are retained beneath the ground-floor windows, and there is extravagant stained-glass on the mezzanine. Vestiges of former splendour remain in the Archives search room, with its acanthus plasterwork, mantelpiece and mirror, and in the former New Assembly rooms, now the Cambrian Hall, with ‘Q H’ on the iron spandrels. Post-1945 the hotel was converted by G. R. Bruce, County Architect, into the County Offices.
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