The Welsh Shopping Centre: The Central Wales Emporium and the Thomas Family of Penybont

There are some buildings which tell the story of a town more clearly than any official history. In Llandrindod Wells, the old Central Wales Emporium is one of them. It stood at the heart of the new spa town, close to the railway, where visitors arrived, residents shopped, hotel servants carried messages, apprentices hurried between departments, and the commercial life of Victorian and Edwardian Llandrindod was made visible. It was not simply a shop. It was a department store, a workplace, a warehouse, a tailoring house, a cafe, a bakery, a drapery, a grocery, a social institution, and for many years one of the most ambitious businesses in Mid Wales.

The Penybont Dynasty

The story, however, does not begin in Llandrindod Wells. It begins at Penybont, with the Thomas family, and with three generations of men named William Thomas. The first, William Thomas I, 1779-1861, founded the family’s shopkeeping tradition at Penybont. His son, William Thomas II, 1812-1884, carried the business forward as proprietor of the Thomas Shop. It was the third William, William Thomas III, 1853-1941, who took the family’s rural trading culture into the new spa town and became proprietor of the Central Wales Emporium. The repeated name can make the story confusing, but it is also revealing. The Emporium was not the sudden creation of one ambitious man. It was the third-generation expression of a family business already rooted in Radnorshire commerce.

The Thomas Shop at Penybont had itself grown out of an older rural economy. Penybont stood on important routes through central Radnorshire, connected with droving, fairs, markets, farming, chapel life and the everyday needs of a scattered rural population. By the nineteenth century, the Thomas family had developed the shop into far more than a simple village store. It combined grocery, drapery, tailoring, warehousing and service. The business was known for its blends of tea and for its tailoring, with customers reportedly travelling considerable distances to be fitted. The shop was not merely serving a village. It was serving a district.

That distinction matters, because it explains the later success of the Central Wales Emporium. William Thomas III did not arrive in Llandrindod Wells as a shopkeeper trying his luck in a growing town. He came from a family culture which already understood range, reputation, service, credit, staff, delivery, rural customers and specialist departments. What changed was the setting. Penybont belonged to an older Radnorshire world of farms, chapel, fairs and local service. Llandrindod Wells belonged to the railway age, to the spa season, to hotels, visitors, medical fashion, promenades, shopping and leisure. The genius of the Emporium was that it translated the Thomas family’s rural trading experience into the commercial language of a modern Victorian spa town.

A Spa-Town Landmark

The Central Wales Emporium opened in Llandrindod Wells in 1881. It occupied a commanding position at the corner of Temple Street and Station Crescent, one of the key commercial points in the town. The site mattered. Llandrindod’s railway connection had helped turn the old spa landscape into a resort of national reach, drawing visitors from South Wales, the Midlands, the North West and beyond. A large and ambitious shop near the station was not merely convenient. It was part of the first impression of the town. It told visitors that Llandrindod Wells was not an isolated watering place, but a confident, well-supplied, modern resort. For the wider story of the town’s waters and railway-era growth, see The Waters That Built a Town and The Mid-Wales Railway.

An advertisement from 1884 shows how deliberately William Thomas linked the new Emporium with the old Penybont business. Published only three years after the Llandrindod shop opened, it described “The Central Wales Emporium and Penybont” and stated that the business had been established by the present proprietor’s grandfather in 1799. This was not accidental wording. It was a claim of continuity. The new Emporium borrowed authority from the older Thomas Shop. Its Llandrindod modernity was grounded in Penybont respectability.

The 1884 advertisement also shows the range of the business at an early stage. It promoted tailoring, dressmaking and millinery, together with suitings, dress materials, mantles, shawls, warehousing, funeral and wedding orders, and parcels sent carriage paid. It even stated that the foreman tailor attended the Temperance Hotel at Knighton every Thursday during March and April. This is an important detail. The Emporium was not just waiting for customers to enter its Llandrindod premises. It was operating across a wider Mid Wales district, linking village, spa town and market town through goods, travel, reputation and personal service.

By 1887 the business was already substantial. An advertisement for W. Thomas’s “Annual Great Genuine Clearance Sale” at the Central Wales Emporium offered the whole stock, valued at about £7,000, for speedy clearance at “immense reductions.” The advertised goods included mantles, Indian cashmere shawls, fur tippets, dress materials, woollen cloths, boys’ and youths’ suits, hats, scarves, fancy goods, travelling cases, handbags, family drapery and carpets. The establishment was to close the previous Friday for re-marking before the sale began at ten o’clock on Saturday, 27 August, continuing for one month. This was modern retailing in a Victorian spa town: seasonal, promotional, carefully advertised and designed to convert Llandrindod’s annual flow of visitors into trade.

The Welsh Shopping Centre

The later advertisements show the Emporium at the height of its confidence. By June 1909 it was trading as the Central Wales Emporium Limited and styling itself as “The Welsh Shopping Centre.” The phrase is remarkable. It was not presenting itself modestly as a draper, grocer or outfitter. It claimed a regional role. Visitors and residents were invited to inspect varied and up-to-date stock in all departments. The list was expansive: high-class tailoring, dressmaking, millinery, ladies’ costumes, blouses and skirts, Welsh tweeds, flannels and serges, outfitting, hosiery, underclothing, ladies’ and gentlemen’s rainproof and motor garments, Welsh woollen rugs and shawls, travelling rugs, furniture, carpets, curtains, upholstery, grocery, provisions, bread and confectionery.

The Emporium’s use of Welsh identity also deserves attention. Its claim to be “The Welsh Shopping Centre” was not simply a slogan for visitors. Penybont history notes suggest that around 1900 William Thomas advertised the Emporium with a poster in Welsh, at a time when the language had declined sharply in much of Radnorshire but had not disappeared from local life. That detail gives the business a more complicated cultural position. It was modern, commercial and tourist-facing, but it still drew upon the older linguistic and chapel world of Mid Wales.

The bakery department had been enlarged and fitted with Perkins’ Patent Ovens, a small but revealing detail. It shows investment, confidence and the scale of the food side of the business. The same 1909 advertisement asked visitors to call at the warehouse before leaving town for patterns of specialities, with an illustrated price list sent free to any address. That line is one of the keys to understanding the Emporium. It was not simply serving people who happened to be in Llandrindod Wells. It was turning visitors into future customers. The spa season brought them to the town, but patterns, samples and price lists could follow them home. In that respect, its story also belongs beside the wider history of Welsh retail innovation represented by Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones of Newtown.

Shopping and Service

The Emporium therefore belonged to several worlds at once. It served local residents, seasonal visitors, hotel guests, rural households, wedding parties, funeral clients, and customers who might continue buying by post after leaving Llandrindod. It sold goods, but it also sold the image of Llandrindod Wells as fashionable, orderly and prosperous. Its Welsh woollens and “Spa Flannel” tied the business to place. Its motor garments and travelling rugs reflected changing habits of mobility. Its cafe, bakery and grocery departments connected it with the practical life of the town. Its tailoring, dressmaking and millinery departments placed it within the rituals of appearance, respectability and social display.

The Emporium’s reach also extended into the solemn business of death. One local report records the Central Wales Emporium Company supplying a funeral car drawn by two black horses and making the funeral arrangements under the personal supervision of Mr W. Thomas. This is a revealing detail. A business of this kind did not merely sell fashionable goods to visitors. It served families at moments of marriage, mourning and public respectability. It helped clothe, feed, furnish and ceremonially organise the lives of the community.

To shop at the Emporium was to enter a carefully ordered world of departments, counters, assistants, fabrics, fittings and advice. This was not modern self-service retail. Customers expected to be served, shown goods, guided towards suitable cloth, hats, garments, household items or provisions, and, where necessary, measured, fitted or supplied later. A visitor might buy a guidebook, a rug, a length of Spa Flannel, confectionery, or a practical garment for the journey home. A local family might use the grocery, bakery, drapery or furniture departments. A farmer’s wife might come in from the countryside, or continue an older relationship with the Thomas family through Penybont. A hotel guest might browse because the Emporium formed part of the respectable leisure of the spa town. Servants and hotel staff may also have appeared at its counters, not as fashionable customers, but as messengers and practical purchasers within the working machinery of the resort.

This was why the department-store model suited Llandrindod Wells so well. Victorian and Edwardian shopping was becoming more visual, more social and more aspirational. The large shop offered range, novelty and reassurance. It allowed people to compare goods, inspect fashions, order specialist items, and feel that they were participating in the modern commercial life of the town. For women in particular, the department store could offer a respectable public space, neither wholly domestic nor improper, where shopping, sociability and display came together. In a spa town, where visitors dressed, promenaded, attended concerts, wrote postcards, visited pump rooms and dined in hotels, this mattered greatly. The Emporium did not merely sell goods to Llandrindod’s visitors. It helped furnish the performance of being a visitor in Llandrindod.

Staff and Working Life

By 1891, the Emporium was already large enough to appear as a significant employer in the life of the district. A later Penybont census study identified twenty-four people working in the Central Wales Emporium, alongside eleven railway staff in the parish. That comparison is useful. The railway had made Llandrindod Wells possible as a modern spa town, but businesses such as the Emporium gave that new town its daily working life. Behind the shop windows were assistants, apprentices, tailors, dressmakers, milliners, grocers, porters and clerks, many of them young people whose employment tied them to the rhythms of the season, the household and the shop floor.

What makes the Emporium unusually vivid is that memories survive from those who knew its working life. In Voices of Llandrindod Wells, Miss M. Abberley remembered the building as a place of separate departments, from grocery to tailoring. In the tailoring department, clothes could be made through the night for local funerals, and there were prayers every morning before work for the live-in staff. She recalled Mr Jones, the head tailor; Frank Phillips, who specialised in blends of tea and coffee before starting his own successful business; Mrs Davies, who ran the dressmaking department; Mrs Cole in drapery; and a millinery department with drawers full of hats. This was not an anonymous shopfront. It was a world of named workers, departments, apprenticeships, routines and local memory.

The most detailed surviving recollection comes from Mrs Caroline Walters, nee John, who worked at the Emporium as an apprentice around 1914. Writing in later life, she remembered it as a unique establishment with twelve departments. William Thomas was described as a man of strong Christian character, a music lover and choirmaster at the Presbyterian Church in Ithon Road. Apprentices were drawn into his choir, and she recalled singing at larger hotels, with Thomas himself joining in with enthusiasm. This detail matters because it shows how the Emporium operated not only as a commercial concern, but also as part of the moral and musical culture of Nonconformist Llandrindod.

The working life she described was disciplined. Wages were low. A promising apprentice might, after two years, earn 2s. 6d. a week. A sleeve hand could later earn 12 shillings a month. Staff lived in, with boys and girls housed separately. The working day ran from 8.30 in the morning until six or seven in the evening, with meals and a Wednesday half-day. The girls helped carry coal from the cellar. There were fire exercises. Doors were locked at night. Prayers were said at five minutes to ten, after which silence was required. Thomas made nightly inspections of the premises with a lantern. It was retail, but it was also a household, a training institution and a moral regime.

For the staff, the Emporium must have been both opportunity and constraint. It offered training, board, status, discipline, companionship and a route into skilled work, particularly for young women entering dressmaking, millinery, drapery or domestic retail service. It also demanded obedience, long hours and acceptance of a strongly paternal culture. The live-in system blurred the boundary between employment and private life. The employer did not merely control the shop floor. He shaped the rhythm of meals, prayers, leisure, sleep, music and moral conduct. That was not unusual in late Victorian and Edwardian retail, but in a small spa town it would have felt especially close. The Emporium was therefore a place where young workers learned a trade, but also learned their place within a highly ordered commercial household.

The First World War appears in these memories almost as part of the town’s background noise. Llandrindod was full of Royal Army Medical Corps men and war casualties, some arriving on stretchers, many taking the waters. Young men called up for service were held in the Albert Hall overnight before leaving by train at four in the morning, while smaller hotels were used for soldiers’ billets. The Emporium stood in the middle of this wartime spa town, still working, still housing staff, still selling, feeding, tailoring and praying.

William Thomas III himself emerges as a more complicated figure than a simple Victorian entrepreneur. He was modern enough to build a major department store, advertise aggressively, develop departments, use postal trade and supply visitors from across Britain. Yet he remained old-fashioned enough to travel into the countryside for orders, walking from farm to farm with goods on his back. Mona Morgan later remembered Mr Thomas of the Emporium arriving “with the return of the swallows,” calling on farmhouses and giving small gifts such as pencils. A visitor to the Thomas Shop Museum recalled keeping a yellow tailor’s pencil given by him. These memories bring him down from the world of advertisements and ledgers into the world of lanes, farm kitchens and personal reputation.

The Thomas family enterprise also continued to shape Penybont. By 1905, with Llandrindod’s hotels and guest houses thriving, William recognised the demand for laundry services. He asked his brother Alfred Nehemiah Thomas to return to Penybont to run the shop and establish a New Model Steam Laundry. Alfred had been living at Cross Keys as a draper, but came back with his wife Sarah. The laundry was fitted with modern machinery and served the surrounding district. It later closed in 1917, with equipment sold into Llandrindod, a telling sign of how the new town was absorbing functions once supplied by Penybont.

War and Decline

Yet the very conditions which had made the Emporium successful also made it vulnerable. It had grown with the confidence of the spa town. Its departments served hotels, boarding houses, visitors, residents and rural customers whose spending habits belonged to a particular age of railway travel, seasonal resort life, formal dress, live-in service and locally anchored trade. After the First World War, that world became harder to sustain. Llandrindod still had visitors, but the great age of the spa was fading. Medical fashion changed, holidays changed, private motor travel altered patterns of movement, and the interwar years brought a less secure economy. Large premises, specialist departments, live-in staff, stockholding and service all carried costs. What had once looked like strength could become a burden if the seasonal trade weakened.

The Emporium’s decline should therefore be read as part of a wider change in Llandrindod Wells. It was not simply that one business failed. The town which had created the need for such a business was itself changing. A department store depended on confidence, footfall, display and habit. When the spa economy lost its certainty, the Emporium lost part of the world that had sustained it.

The decline of the Emporium came later. In June 1927, the end became formal. At an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders of the Central Wales Emporium Limited, Llandrindod Wells, a resolution was carried unanimously that the company should be wound up by voluntary liquidation. Herbert Alfred Pepper of Birmingham and Charles Stuart Astbury of Shrewsbury were appointed liquidators. This was more than the quiet closing of an old shop; it was the winding-up of a limited company, with shareholders, liquidators and formal obligations.

Two years later, in July 1929, the Western Mail advertised the sale of the freehold business properties by Messrs Button and Son at the Hotel Metropole. The notice described the premises as “the extensive general stores known as The Central Wales Emporium,” occupying “the best position in Llandrindod Wells.” The lots reveal the scale and organisation of the business even after its commercial peak. One included the high-class cafe, confectionery, grocery, provisions and bakery departments. Another comprised the drapery, millinery, mantle, Manchester, outfitting and furnishing departments, with spacious showrooms and living accommodation. A third property, Clovelly in High Street, with residential flats above, produced annual rentals of about £500. The Emporium had become not only a former business, but a group of valuable freehold commercial properties being broken up and absorbed into the changing economy of the town.

The wider family story continued. Alfred Nehemiah Thomas was the last shopkeeper of the Thomas Shop at Penybont, which closed in 1958 on the day he died. His son Jack later developed a chicken farm on family land. The premises eventually passed out of the Thomas family in 1987, before restoration began in 2000 and the shop reopened as a museum in 2003. By then, what had once been an everyday commercial institution had become heritage.

Afterlife and Memory

That afterlife is important. The Thomas Shop at Penybont and the Central Wales Emporium at Llandrindod Wells belong to the same story: the movement from rural service centre to railway resort, from village counter to department store, from chapel discipline to commercial spectacle, from family business to local memory. The Emporium was not just one of the great shops of Llandrindod Wells. It was the Llandrindod expression of a Radnorshire trading dynasty.

Even after the company had gone, the name lingered in the town. By 1932, local buses were leaving from “Emporium Square,” a reminder that the Emporium had become more than a business. It had given its name to a meeting point, a place of movement and orientation. That is often how local memory works. A vanished shop can survive in directions, habits and inherited names long after the counters have been cleared.

Its history also reminds us how easily the commercial life of a town can vanish from public memory. Hotels leave photographs, railway stations leave timetables, churches leave plaques, and grand houses leave estate papers. Shops are more fragile. Their evidence survives in adverts, invoices, recollections, price lists, staff memories, liquidation notices and reused buildings. Yet shops shaped daily life just as powerfully as public institutions. They dressed people, fed people, employed people, trained people, extended credit, carried gossip, supplied funerals and weddings, and gave a town its sense of confidence.

The Central Wales Emporium did all of that. It sold clothes, food, furniture, woollens, patterns, hats, bread, confectionery and travelling rugs. It housed apprentices, employed tailors, trained local girls, sent out price lists, supplied visitors, served residents and carried the Thomas name from Penybont into the centre of Llandrindod Wells. It was, in its own words, “The Welsh Shopping Centre.” More than that, it was one of the buildings through which Victorian and Edwardian Llandrindod imagined itself as modern.

The building itself also had an afterlife. After the 1929 sale, the old Emporium ceased to be one unified department store and became part of the mixed economy of the town, divided into commercial premises, offices and residential accommodation. That later life can still be read in the names attached to the site, including Emporium Buildings, Emporium House and Emporium Flats. Recent property details for Emporium Buildings on Station Crescent show part of it in office use, with a ground-floor reception and first-floor offices, while postcode records preserve the old Emporium name in addresses on Temple Street. The building therefore remained useful, but in a different way. It no longer gathered Llandrindod’s retail life under one roof, yet it continued to hold shops, offices, flats and memories in one of the most visible corners of the town. A Powys conservation review was right to call it the “imposing Emporium Building”, because even after the business had gone, it still helped define the northern entrance into the historic core of Llandrindod Wells.

A Personal Memory

There is also a personal reason why the building has stayed with me. As a child and young man, I was fascinated by it. Even before I understood its full history, it had the look of a building which had once contained a much larger world. Around 2001, I had a series of meetings with figures from Powys County Council about a funding bid in offices then located in the upper parts of the former Emporium. At the time, I was there for practical reasons, thinking about grants, projects and local services rather than Victorian retail history. Looking back, there is a certain symmetry in that. A building once shaped by commerce, staff, departments, customers and civic confidence had become part of the administrative life of modern Powys, still serving the town, but in a very different form.

Today the old Emporium belongs to a different town from the one William Thomas III knew. The spa season has gone, the great department store has gone, the live-in apprentices have gone, and the prayers at five minutes to ten have long fallen silent. Yet the building, the adverts and the memories remain. They remind us that Llandrindod Wells was not made only by doctors, hoteliers, railwaymen and civic leaders. It was also made by shopkeepers, tailors, apprentices, grocers, drapers, errand boys, milliners, bakers and families like the Thomases of Penybont, who understood that commerce, at its best, could give a place identity.

• Llandrindod Wells History, the main guide to the town’s waters, hotels, railway, enterprise and social history.
• Llandrindod Wells Railway Station, the transport system that brought visitors, goods and commercial opportunity into the developing town.
• Bryn Awel and the Glen Usk Hotel, another South Crescent enterprise shaped by the same visitor economy and changing patterns of tourism.
• The Waters That Built a Town, the mineral springs and spa economy that created the market in which the Emporium prospered.
• The Pump House Hotel, the hotel and working community at the centre of the Victorian resort.
• Tom Norton of Llandrindod Wells, a later entrepreneur who carried the town’s commercial culture into the motor age.

Sources and Further Reading

• Cadw listed building report for Maesyfed, Penybont.
• People’s Collection Wales, Central Wales Emporium and related images, including Central Wales Emporium, Llandrindod Wells, c. 1882 and Founders of the Central Wales Emporium, c. 1900.
• Stori Powys / Radnorshire Museum, Central Wales Emporium material.
• Penybont and District Local History Group notes on the Thomas Shop, the Thomas family, the Central Wales Emporium, the 1891 census study, Welsh-language advertising, funeral arrangements and Emporium Square.
• Voices of Llandrindod Wells, compiled by Joel Williams.
• Leominster News and North West Herefordshire & Radnorshire Advertiser, 4 April 1884.
• Central Wales Emporium advertisement, 1887.
• Central Wales Emporium Limited advertisement, June 1909.
• Western Mail, 14 June 1927, voluntary liquidation notice.
• Western Mail, 30 July 1929, sale of freehold business properties.
• Historic England, research on the history and architecture of department stores.
• English Heritage, history of the high street and the rise of the nineteenth-century “big shop”.
• Powys Archives, Llandrindod Wells Urban District Council records, including references to Emporium Square.
• Powys County Council, Llandrindod Wells Conservation Area Review, 2004, including the description of the Emporium as an imposing building at the Temple Street, Station Crescent and Craig Road junction.
• Recent property and postcode records for Emporium Buildings, Emporium House and Emporium Flats, Temple Street and Station Crescent, Llandrindod Wells.
• The National Archives / Powys Archives accessions, including Central Wales Emporium Ltd minutes, 1908-1922, R/BI/9, and additional Thomas Shop and Emporium records, R/D/LM (add).