From Spa Town to Administrative Capital: Civic Government and the Making of Llandrindod Wells

The history of Llandrindod Wells is usually told through its mineral springs, hotels, railway, boarding houses and the thousands of visitors who transformed an upland landscape into one of the principal inland resorts of Victorian and Edwardian Wales. That story is fundamental, but it is only part of the explanation for the town which emerged. From the closing years of the nineteenth century another force became increasingly important. Local government began first to regulate Llandrindod, then to improve it, acquire parts of it, operate some of its most important amenities and, ultimately, provide the town with an economic purpose quite different from the spa trade which had created it.

The progression was remarkable. Llandrindod acquired its own Local Board in 1891 and an Urban District Council in 1894. Meanwhile, the newly created Radnorshire County Council had already chosen the town as the place in which it would meet, in preference to the historic county town of Presteigne. Permanent County Buildings followed in 1909. During the twentieth century county administration expanded into the former Gwalia Hotel, and when the much larger county of Powys was created in 1974, Llandrindod emerged from another contested selection process as its administrative centre. By 1990 a purpose-built County Hall stood on the site where Radnorshire County Council had begun meeting a century earlier.

This was not simply a history of councils and committees. Civic government profoundly affected water, sanitation, housing, streets, public health, recreation, the Lake, the Common, the Pavilion, the spa and the physical appearance of the town. When the old resort economy declined, public administration also became an important source of employment. The spa created Llandrindod, but local government helped to make it a functioning town and, ultimately, to reinvent it.

Before the Local Board

The speed with which Victorian Llandrindod developed inevitably created problems which could not indefinitely be managed through arrangements devised for a sparsely populated rural district. Hotels, villas, boarding houses, shops and public buildings were being constructed around a settlement which only a generation earlier had scarcely existed in recognisable urban form. Water had to be supplied, sewage removed, streets maintained and lit, public health protected and an increasingly complex built environment regulated.

Before Llandrindod possessed its own authority, responsibility was divided between older bodies. Sanitary administration was associated with the Rhayader Rural Sanitary Authority, while a Cefnllys parochial committee dealt with some local matters and the Trefonen Lighting Inspectors were responsible for street lighting. Men who would later dominate the new town’s civic affairs were already active within these arrangements. The gradual development of specifically urban government was therefore not an abrupt beginning, but a response to a settlement which had outgrown the institutions inherited from the countryside around it.

The establishment of elected county government brought an even more consequential change. The Local Government Act 1888 created elected county councils throughout England and Wales, transferring significant administrative responsibilities from the older Quarter Sessions. Radnorshire County Council was therefore a new institution, and one of its earliest decisions concerned where that institution should conduct its business.

The vote that changed Llandrindod, 1889

On Friday, 29 March 1889, the provisional Radnorshire County Council met at the Shire Hall in Presteigne. Lord Ormathwaite presided and twenty-seven members were present. Presteigne had centuries of county tradition behind it, but the new council was not bound to continue the geography of the old administration.

Alderman William Bowen Davies proposed that, from the appointed day, the County Council should meet at Llandrindod Wells. After discussion the question was decided by the narrowest of margins. Twelve members voted for Llandrindod and eleven against.

It is difficult to overstate the long-term significance of that vote. The wider history stretched back much further: New Radnor had been the Tudor shire town, while Presteigne later became the county’s principal judicial centre. Llandrindod was still a young spa town, whereas Presteigne possessed the Shire Hall, established legal institutions and the historic standing of a county town. Yet Llandrindod had advantages which belonged to the new age. Its railway connections made it comparatively accessible from different parts of an awkwardly shaped and thinly populated county, while its hotels could accommodate councillors, officials and visitors. Its growth had also given it a confidence which Presteigne’s greater antiquity could not necessarily match.

Bowen Davies appears to have been much more than the formal mover of the resolution. A later recollection of the argument referred to him and a Llandrindod deputation travelling to Presteigne to promote the advantages of meeting at the spa, with the humorous recollection that councillors had effectively been promised that, once in Llandrindod, they would be “in heaven”. Behind the humour lay a determined campaign to redirect the machinery of modern county government.

The decision did not immediately deprive Presteigne of its judicial functions or ancient status. Assizes and Quarter Sessions were separate questions, and the Shire Hall remained significant. What changed in 1889 was the direction of administrative gravity. The new form of county government chose the new town.

For many years the County Council met at the Pump House Hotel. That fact would acquire an extraordinary historical resonance. Eighty-five years later the first Powys County Council would establish its headquarters at the same former hotel, and the modern County Hall would eventually rise within its grounds.

Llandrindod gets a government of its own

County government arrived before Llandrindod possessed a specifically urban authority of its own. That changed in 1891 with the creation of the Llandrindod Local Board.

The first election, held on 22 May 1891, gives a vivid picture of the men who were expected to govern the rapidly expanding town. Twenty candidates contested the places. Joseph Hurst of Ithon View headed the poll with 138 votes, closely followed by Dr William Bowen Davies of Brynarlais with 136, Thomas Edwards of Tycanol with 135 and Evan Bufton of London House with 131. William Thomas of the Emporium, Archdeacon de Winton, Charles Owen of Warwick House and others were also among the leading candidates. A tie between Carless of Rock House and Wilding of the Bridge Hotel left the final position to be settled after the principal results had been declared.

The names are revealing. Doctors, businessmen, hotel interests, clergy, builders, property owners and traders were all represented. These were, in many cases, the same people whose commercial and professional activity was constructing Victorian Llandrindod. The distinction between those who built the town privately and those who governed it publicly was therefore often blurred.

The newspaper which reported the election presumed that Joseph Hurst, having headed the poll, would become chairman. It was wrong. Dr William Bowen Davies became the first chairman of the Local Board, reinforcing the considerable standing he had already acquired in the developing town.

The work before the new authority was practical rather than ceremonial. Public health was becoming inseparable from the prosperity of a resort whose reputation depended upon visitors believing that Llandrindod offered clean air, clean water and health. Within only two years, the Board was prepared to confront one of the most important private undertakings in the town.

The battle over water

In 1893 the disagreement between Llandrindod Local Board and the private water company reached the House of Commons. The Board opposed a Parliamentary Order which would have allowed the company to raise additional capital. Its objections concerned both the quantity and the quality of the supply.

The parliamentary debate referred back to an 1889 report by a Local Government Board medical inspector which had concluded that the private company was failing adequately to meet the district’s requirements during periods of drought. Of still greater concern was the admission that part of the supply was pumped from the River Ithon. The Local Board maintained that sewage from settlements and properties upstream made the river unsuitable as a source for a health resort. It argued that a better supply was available and that the town should not be left dependent upon an unsatisfactory private monopoly.

The episode is important because it demonstrates how quickly the Local Board developed an independent civic voice. Its purpose was not simply to hold meetings and administer regulations. It was prepared to challenge private commercial interests where councillors believed the health and future of Llandrindod were at stake.

That tension between private development and public control would recur repeatedly over the following decades.

Water becomes a municipal service

The dispute of 1893 did not end with criticism of the private water company. During the following years the Urban District Council moved towards taking direct control of the supply itself. The decisive legal step came with the Llandrindod Wells Water Act 1901, which received Royal Assent on 26 July. It authorised the council to purchase the undertaking of the Llandrindod Wells Water Company, construct additional waterworks and supply water within the urban district and adjoining places.

This was one of the clearest early examples of Llandrindod moving from a privately developed resort towards a municipality responsible for essential infrastructure. A decade earlier the local authority had complained that the town’s water supply was inadequate and potentially unsuitable for a health resort. By the opening years of the twentieth century it had acquired the power to own and develop that supply itself.

The surviving council archive shows how substantial the undertaking became. Waterworks Committee records run from 1904 onwards, alongside Sanitary Committee papers, water-rate records and plans for mains and supply schemes. The water question was therefore not a single Victorian controversy but the beginning of a long municipal responsibility which reached directly into every home, hotel and business in the town.

The Urban District Council, 1894

The Local Government Act 1894 reorganised local administration and provided that urban sanitary authorities should henceforth be known as Urban District Councils. It also removed sex and marriage as disqualifications for election to an urban district council, a provision which would have an immediate significance in Llandrindod.

The first election to the Llandrindod Urban District Council in December 1894 was anything but a quiet administrative transition. Twenty candidates stood for nine places and the Brecon County Times described interest in the contest as “unbounded”. Some members of the old Local Board had become unpopular with a section of the electorate, and there was a determined attempt to displace them.

One of the principal issues was remarkably modern. Electors wanted the proceedings of their new council opened to authorised newspaper reporters. The popular cry was “Free Press”, and the successful candidates were expected to permit proper reporting of council meetings. At the birth of the new authority, therefore, Llandrindod was already arguing about transparency, accountability and the right of residents to know what their representatives were doing.

Evan Bufton, an auctioneer and one of the most energetic figures in the developing town, headed the poll with 106 votes. His supporters were so delighted that he was carried home shoulder-high. Jeffrey Jones, another man who would spend decades in public life, received 100 votes. Among the successful candidates was Elizabeth Maria Priscilla Duffield, the formidable manageress of the Pump House Hotel. She received 88 votes.

Duffield’s election deserves particular notice. She entered the council in December 1894, during the first elections held under legislation which explicitly provided that women could not be excluded from urban district councils because of their sex or marital status. She should not be described without further comparative research as the first woman district councillor in Britain, but her election places Llandrindod very early in the new legal landscape of female participation in municipal government.

Dr Bowen Davies became the first chairman of the Urban District Council, continuing the leadership he had provided to the Local Board.

The politics of the new council also reflected the wider world. Candidates were identified as Liberal or Conservative, although much municipal business could not easily be reduced to party allegiance. Clean water, drains, streets, fire protection, parks and the commercial success of the spa affected Conservatives and Liberals alike.

From regulating the town to building it

During the following years the Urban District Council became increasingly ambitious. The distinction between governing Llandrindod and developing Llandrindod steadily diminished.

The everyday work was extensive. Council business involved water mains, sewerage, road surfaces, public health, milk and dairy regulation, fire protection, refuse, cemeteries and planning. A council meeting could move from questions of inadequate water pressure during a fire to the inspection of cowsheds and the extension of a sewer. These were mundane responsibilities when compared with great hotels and spa architecture, but they were what transformed a collection of private developments into a functioning town.

At the same time, the council increasingly pursued powers and property of its own. In 1903 the UDC promoted a Parliamentary improvement bill which sought authority to acquire land for recreation grounds and springs and to expand its powers over the improvement, health, government and finances of the district.

The 1903 attempt did not produce the settlement the council wanted, but municipal ambition did not disappear. The council returned to Parliament and the Llandrindod Wells Urban District Council Act 1905 gave it further powers over improvement, health, local government and finance.

The importance of these powers becomes clearer when set beside the physical development of the town. The council increasingly saw the Common, Lake, recreation facilities and mineral-water interests not as unrelated features but as parts of a single resort economy. Preserving open ground could be an economic policy. Building a Pavilion could be an economic policy. Improving roads, water, walks and recreation could also be an economic policy.

Municipal government in Llandrindod was becoming a form of town development.

The Lake and Common become municipal assets

One of the most consequential decisions came in 1907, when the Urban District Council acquired the Lake and Common for £21,420.

The purchase was far more than an exercise in preserving open space. Councillors understood that the land surrounding the Lake had commercial value, that building plots might recoup part of the purchase price, and that the Lake itself could produce income. Yet there was also a wider recognition that uncontrolled private development around one of Llandrindod’s defining open spaces could permanently alter the character of the resort.

After the acquisition, the council began shaping the area as a municipal leisure landscape. Money was sought for a new boathouse, landing stage, refreshment accommodation and public conveniences. Princes Avenue was subsequently created and formally opened in 1910. Boating, promenading, golf and other recreation became part of a landscape which was increasingly being planned and maintained for both residents and visitors.

The Grand Pavilion belonged to the same period of municipal confidence. Its development was tied closely to the Urban District Council, which became responsible not merely for constructing a large public entertainment building but also for its management and place within the wider visitor economy. The Pavilion could accommodate gatherings on a scale previously difficult in the town, giving Llandrindod an important new venue for conferences, entertainment and civic events.

The Recreation Ground likewise demonstrates that municipal development involved choices. Councillors debated improvements, sporting facilities and the demands made upon the ground. In 1912 concern was expressed that the expansion of Pavilion and bowling facilities had reduced the amount of space available to children, prompting discussion of alternative provision. The council was continually balancing the requirements of a resort against those of a permanent community.

A Town Hall for a maturing authority

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the council itself had outgrown its makeshift accommodation.

The solution was Brynarlais, the substantial house built for Dr William Bowen Davies in about 1872 and later enlarged. Following his death in 1908 the property came onto the market. It was initially withdrawn at auction, but the Urban District Council eventually agreed to acquire it for £5,500, seeking borrowing authority for £6,000.

The scale of council business explains why permanent accommodation had become necessary. At the public inquiry into the purchase in November 1909, evidence suggested that the authority was holding around twenty-five full council meetings and more than ninety committee meetings a year. Llandrindod’s local government had become a substantial organisation.

There was opposition. Ratepayers questioned cost and necessity, and the proposals extended beyond simply providing a council chamber. Plans involved civic accommodation and a public library, assisted by a Carnegie grant, while other municipal possibilities were discussed. The debate again exposed a recurring tension in Llandrindod politics between civic ambition and the burden placed upon ratepayers.

The purchase proceeded. The deeds were sealed in April 1910 and Brynarlais became the Town Hall.

There was a particular appropriateness in the transformation. The home of William Bowen Davies, first chairman of both the Local Board and the Urban District Council, became the headquarters of the institution he had helped to establish.

Presteigne fights for its old position

While Llandrindod was developing its own municipal government, Radnorshire County Council was becoming ever more firmly established in the town. By the Edwardian period, however, the question of permanent County Buildings reopened the old rivalry with Presteigne.

The debate of 1906 is particularly revealing. Supporters of Presteigne objected to proposals which were expected to cost in the region of £10,000. Sir Powlett Milbank defended the position of the historic county town and resisted any implication that its judicial institutions should be stripped away. Others argued that ratepayers were being asked to finance expensive new buildings at Llandrindod when accommodation already existed elsewhere.

The case for Llandrindod was practical. The County Council had already been meeting there for more than fifteen years. One councillor described it as the most central place in Radnorshire and argued that, if new public buildings were required, they ought to be constructed there. The disagreement exposed the essential difference between the rival claims. Presteigne possessed history. Llandrindod possessed the administrative momentum of the modern county council.

Plans advanced during 1906 and 1907. The scheme involved not simply council offices but police and court accommodation, with the Standing Joint Committee and Llandrindod Urban District Council participating in discussions. Construction was clearly progressing by July 1908, when the County Surveyor reported satisfactorily on the new buildings.

County Buildings, 15 May 1909

The new Radnorshire County Buildings were ceremonially opened on Saturday, 15 May 1909.

The opening was deliberately made into something much larger than the inauguration of offices. Llandrindod was decorated with flags and bunting. More than 150 acceptances had been received from doctors and leading pressmen, railway officials attended, and arrangements were made for a special train from London. There was a procession, a luncheon at the Albert Hall, military music, police, the fire brigade and other local organisations.

Visitors were not simply shown County Buildings. They were shown Llandrindod.

The golf links were opened to guests. The baths and pump rooms could be inspected. Tea was provided by prominent local hosts, including Miss Duffield. Concerts, dramatic entertainment, carriage and motor excursions completed a programme designed to present the town at its best.

The strategy worked. A week later the Leicester Pioneer was telling readers well beyond Wales about a Mid Wales town which had grown from a tiny settlement into a substantial spa of great hotels, private hotels, boarding houses and lodging accommodation. It described doctors being conducted around the baths and springs and noted the presence of railway officials and journalists.

County Buildings therefore served two purposes from the beginning. They demonstrated that Radnorshire County Council’s presence in Llandrindod had become permanent, but their opening was also used to advertise the resort.

Twenty years after the 12 to 11 vote which brought the council’s meetings to Llandrindod, county administration had acquired an architectural home.

What county government meant

The presence of Radnorshire County Council in Llandrindod was not important simply because councillors met there or because offices were built. As county government expanded, so did the range of services administered from the town. Education became a major county responsibility, and the surviving records include the Llandrindod Wells School Management Committee from the 1890s as well as later school, library and School Medical Officer records. Roads and bridges, planning and development, public health and other county-wide services likewise generated an increasingly substantial administrative presence.

Between 1930 and 1948 the County Council also administered the old Poor Law functions transferred from the Boards of Guardians. Radnorshire was divided into public-assistance districts which included Llandrindod Wells, bringing relief, institutional care and welfare administration into the county system. This is an important part of the social history of civic Llandrindod. County government affected not only ratepayers, roads and schools but people experiencing poverty, sickness and dependency.

The growth of these responsibilities helps explain why the buildings required by county administration became progressively larger. The County Buildings of 1909 represented one stage in that process. By the middle of the century they could no longer accommodate an authority whose work had expanded far beyond the comparatively limited functions inherited in 1889.

The council becomes part of the spa

Municipal ambition did not end with the Edwardian building programme.

In 1920 a further Llandrindod Wells Urban District Council Bill was promoted specifically to give the authority powers concerning the utilisation of springs and the provision of pump rooms and baths, together with additional financial and other powers.

This was a logical development. The council had begun by regulating a privately developed resort. It was now moving towards direct responsibility for parts of the resort itself.

The municipal takeover of the spa was not a single decision made in 1925 but the culmination of a longer civic project. Powys Archives preserves papers concerning the proposed purchase of the springs from 1919 to 1925 and the acquisition of Llandrindod Wells Springs Ltd, including the Pavilion and estates, from 1920 to 1926. By 1926 the council had a Spa Manager reporting to its Baths and Springs Committee. The transfer represented an important stage in the municipalisation of the resort. Facilities upon which Llandrindod’s national reputation had been built were no longer solely commercial concerns, they had become civic assets.

The council continued to invest in the inter-war years. Waterworks were extended, including plans for a new reservoir, Rock Park facilities received further attention, electricity tariffs were considered and recreation remained part of municipal policy. There was even an attempt in 1929 to acquire the Pump House Hotel and its associated baths and grounds, although that particular purchase did not proceed.

The scope of council activity is important. By this stage local government touched almost every aspect of urban life, from clean water and sewage to recreation, housing, electricity, libraries, public spaces and the spa itself.

For residents, this was what civic government meant. It was not an abstract constitutional structure. It determined the water coming from the tap, the drain beneath the street, the condition of the road, the regulation of food and milk, the availability of recreation and increasingly the appearance of the town itself.

Housing, electricity and the permanent town

The same period saw the Urban District Council move into responsibilities which belonged less to the seasonal resort than to the lives of permanent residents. The council’s surviving housing records include a Post-War Housing Scheme running from 1919 to 1926. This coincided with continued residential development on former common land and marked a significant change in emphasis. Victorian Llandrindod had been built principally around visitors, hotels and the spa season. The inter-war authority increasingly had to consider the housing needs of people who lived and worked in the town throughout the year.

Housing remained a continuing civic concern. An overcrowding survey undertaken under the Housing Act 1935 survives among the council records, evidence of the extent to which local government had moved into the private domestic sphere through inspection, standards and the provision of homes. This was another stage in Llandrindod becoming an ordinary working town as well as a resort.

Electricity followed a similar path from private enterprise into municipal control. Public electricity supply had begun in Llandrindod in the 1890s, and by 1925–26 the Urban District Council had exercised its right to purchase the company undertaking. Council Electricity Committee minutes survive from the later 1920s, together with electricity ledgers extending through the 1930s and 1940s. The local authority was therefore not merely regulating private utilities, it was itself running a trading undertaking.

That municipal electricity undertaking ended with nationalisation. Under the Electricity (Allocation of Undertakings to Area Boards) Order 1948, Llandrindod Wells Urban District Council was among the authorities whose electricity undertaking passed to the South Wales Electricity Board. The episode illustrates the changing scale of government during the twentieth century. Responsibilities which had first moved from private companies into the hands of a small urban council were increasingly absorbed into regional and national systems.

Government in wartime

The Second World War enlarged the council’s role again. The surviving UDC records include air-raid precautions, fuel, fire and ambulance arrangements, food control, military and wartime industries, evacuation accommodation and post-war development planning. In an emergency the local council became one of the mechanisms through which central government reached directly into everyday life.

One particularly revealing survival is the file for Llandrindod’s British Restaurant scheme, including tokens and financial statements covering 1942 to 1946. British Restaurants were intended to provide inexpensive communal meals during wartime conditions. Their presence in the council archive is a reminder that municipal government was not only concerned with buildings and infrastructure. During the war it was also involved in feeding people, organising emergency services and accommodating those displaced by national events.

The wartime experience also accelerated planning for what would follow. Council papers survive for post-war development from 1943 to 1945. By then the authority which had begun life half a century earlier dealing with sanitation and streets was participating in the wider reconstruction of the town.

From County Buildings to the Gwalia

By the late 1940s the machinery of county government had expanded beyond the capacity of the County Buildings which had seemed so ambitious in 1909.

Radnorshire County Council therefore turned to one of Llandrindod’s great former hotels. The Gwalia was offered for sale in 1948 with 105 bedrooms and the extensive public and service rooms of a major resort hotel. The County Council made an offer of £25,000, which was accepted by November that year. Conversion followed, bringing together departments which had previously been dispersed among several premises. On 18 May 1951 Captain Geoffrey Crawshay formally opened the former hotel as Radnorshire County Hall.

The change was symbolic of Llandrindod’s wider transformation. Buildings constructed for the great spa era were finding new uses as the visitor economy changed. The Gwalia, once intended to accommodate visitors to the resort, now accommodated the expanding bureaucracy of the county.

The future of the old County Buildings was already under discussion in July 1949. The recently established Mid-Wales Police Authority considered whether they might have a role in its headquarters arrangements, with Radnorshire County Council prepared to sell at the district valuer’s figure. During that discussion one participant remarked that any fair-minded observer would regard Llandrindod as the natural centre, although Newtown had its supporters.

The proposal did not result in the Mid-Wales Police headquarters being transferred from Newtown, but the discussion is revealing. Sixty years after Llandrindod had been preferred to Presteigne for Radnorshire County Council, its geographical position was being advanced in arguments about the administration of Mid Wales as a whole.

County Buildings subsequently became closely associated with police and court use, while the Gwalia remained at the centre of Radnorshire administration.

The creation of Powys

The next great transformation came with the Local Government Act 1972. On 1 April 1974 the old administrative counties of Radnorshire, Breconshire and Montgomeryshire disappeared into the new county of Powys. A two-tier system was created, with Powys County Council above three district authorities. In the Radnorshire area the lower-tier authority was initially called Radnor District Council, later adopting the name Radnorshire.

The disappearance of Llandrindod Wells Urban District Council ended an institution which had governed the town for eighty years. It did not, however, end specifically local representation. Llandrindod Wells Town Council was established in 1974, and one of the most tangible links with the old authority survived with it. The Urban District Council’s chain of office was transferred to the new Town Council and continues to be used by the town’s mayor.

Nor did the Gwalia cease to be a civic headquarters. It became the base of Radnor District Council, later Radnorshire District Council, preserving a direct institutional connection between the former county authority and the post-1974 district administration.

The largest question, however, was where the new Powys County Council should be based.

Llandrindod versus Newtown

Llandrindod’s selection as the administrative headquarters of Powys was not automatic.

In November 1972, while reorganisation was still being prepared, a joint committee representing the three old counties considered the location of the future headquarters. It recommended Llandrindod Wells by only five votes to four. The Montgomeryshire representatives abstained, maintaining that insufficient information was available to make a properly informed choice.

Their objections were practical. They wanted more information about offices, housing, building land, staff recruitment and employment, particularly the availability of junior employees. Independent professional advice was sought.

Newtown then mounted its own case. Its advocates argued that it could provide accommodation for staff, possessed an available workforce and was better equipped for the incoming administration. The headquarters question therefore carried considerable economic significance. A county headquarters meant far more than a council chamber. It meant hundreds of jobs, professional families, housing demand, office development and public expenditure.

There is a striking parallel with 1889. Radnorshire County Council had chosen Llandrindod by 12 votes to 11. More than eighty years later, Llandrindod emerged from the preliminary Powys argument by another narrow vote, although the 1972 decision was only a recommendation and Montgomeryshire’s representatives had abstained.

What Llandrindod possessed in the 1970s was accumulated administrative experience. County government had been centred there for generations. It had offices, public institutions and a workforce accustomed to public administration. The selection of Llandrindod as the centre of Powys therefore represented an enlargement of an existing role rather than the invention of an entirely new one.

Back to the Pump House

There was a remarkable historical symmetry in the choice of accommodation.

Powys County Council acquired the former Pump House Hotel in 1974 for use as its headquarters.

The same Pump House in which the new Radnorshire County Council had begun meeting after the vote of 1889 now became the headquarters of the much larger authority which succeeded it eighty-five years later.

The building had experienced many different lives since its great hotel days, but it was one of the few structures in Llandrindod capable of accommodating large parts of a new county administration. The arrangement was practical rather than ideal, and the converted hotel ultimately proved unsuitable as a permanent modern headquarters.

By the early 1980s plans were being developed for a purpose-built replacement.

A new County Hall beside the Lake

The proposed County Hall immediately exposed a tension between two versions of Llandrindod.

In May 1983 tourism interests and the Chamber of Trade objected to the preferred site on the lawns behind the existing headquarters. Their concern was the visual effect of a large administrative complex upon the setting of Llandrindod Lake. They suggested using the existing car park instead, further away from the lakeside.

County Architect Peter Wharton explained that a geological fault crossed the alternative site. He nevertheless acknowledged the sensitivity of the chosen position and argued that the new building should minimise its visual effect when viewed from the Lake and require as little removal of mature trees as possible.

The contrast with 1909 was striking. When County Buildings had opened, the occasion had been used to promote Llandrindod as a spa. In 1983 representatives of the tourist economy were concerned that the expansion of county administration might itself damage the landscape upon which the resort depended.

The project was then estimated at about £4.7 million. By July 1985 construction had advanced sufficiently for a Shrewsbury contractor to prepare for one of its most conspicuous features. The Shropshire Star reported that the slate roof was expected to be the largest in Europe, a contemporary claim which reflected the sheer scale of the project. Around £80,000 worth of slate was required.

Work continued through the later 1980s. By 1989 the new headquarters was being described as a £6.25 million County Hall. Staff were already occupying it while the old Pump House headquarters was being demolished. Electricity costs in the new complex were attracting criticism, particularly because for a period the council was paying bills on both the old and new buildings.

The landscaping continued into 1990. An ornamental lake in front of the new headquarters was reported to cost £182,763 and was expected to be completed that spring. Part of the intention was to soften the relationship between the large modern building and its lakeside setting.

The new County Hall was therefore operational before its ceremonial opening. Powys Archives preserves the programme for the official opening on 27 November 1990.

A century after Radnorshire County Council had chosen Llandrindod as its meeting place, a purpose-built headquarters for Powys stood on virtually the same administrative site.

An administrative town

By 1990 contemporary observers were openly describing Llandrindod as the county town of Powys.

The transformation could be seen in employment as much as architecture. A South Shropshire Journal account that year observed that local government was one of the town’s principal sources of work. Llandrindod then contained the headquarters of both Powys County Council at the new County Hall and Radnorshire District Council at the Gwalia.

That represented an extraordinary reversal in the economic history of the town. Victorian Llandrindod had been constructed principally to receive outsiders. Hotels, boarding houses, baths, pump rooms, shops and entertainment depended upon a seasonal flow of visitors. Twentieth-century administrative Llandrindod increasingly provided permanent employment for people who lived in the town and surrounding district throughout the year.

At the same time, efforts were being made to rediscover and promote the Victorian resort heritage. Llandrindod therefore entered the final decade of the twentieth century with two powerful identities, one inherited from the spa, the other created by more than a century of civic administration.

The two were not entirely separate. Government had helped preserve and shape many of the very features which were now being promoted as heritage.

The reorganisation of 1996

The two-tier Powys settlement lasted little more than twenty years.

Under the Local Government (Wales) Act 1994 a new system of principal authorities came into operation on 1 April 1996. Powys became a single principal authority, combining responsibilities which had previously been divided between county and district councils. Radnorshire District Council disappeared and its functions passed into the new Powys structure.

The Town Council remained, preserving the specifically local tier created in 1974. Today it continues as the most local statutory authority for Llandrindod Wells, while Powys County Council remains headquartered at County Hall.

The administrative structures have therefore changed repeatedly, but Llandrindod’s role has endured.

The buildings tell the story

The history can almost be read through four buildings.

Brynarlais represents municipal Llandrindod. Built as Bowen Davies’s home, it became the Town Hall in 1910 and embodied the confidence of an Urban District Council which had progressed from sanitary regulation to the management of a substantial resort town.

County Buildings represents the victory of modern administration over historic geography. The narrow decision of 1889 had initially required little more than meeting accommodation. By 1909 Radnorshire County Council had invested in permanent buildings at Llandrindod, despite opposition from those who believed county institutions properly belonged in Presteigne.

The Gwalia represents the expansion of government and the adaptation of the Victorian resort. A great hotel became the headquarters of Radnorshire County Council, then of the post-1974 district authority. The changing use of the building reflected the changing economy of the town itself.

The Pump House and County Hall site represents the longest continuity of all. Radnorshire councillors met at the Pump House from the beginnings of elected county government. Powys returned to the same building in 1974, and when the hotel finally disappeared a purpose-built headquarters rose beside its site.

Few towns possess such a clear architectural record of the relationship between resort history and public administration.

More than councils and committees

It would be easy to regard local-government history as a succession of boundaries, Acts and reorganisations. In Llandrindod that would miss its real importance.

The Local Board and Urban District Council were deeply involved in turning a rapidly constructed Victorian resort into an organised community. They confronted problems of water and sewage, regulated public health, improved roads, provided recreation, acquired the Lake and Common, developed public buildings and gradually assumed responsibility for parts of the spa itself.

They also generated argument. Ratepayers objected to expenditure. Councillors disagreed over priorities. Businesses and residents could want different things. Presteigne resisted the movement of county administration. Newtown challenged Llandrindod for the Powys headquarters. Tourism interests objected when the new County Hall threatened, in their view, to intrude upon the Lake.

That disagreement is part of the history rather than an inconvenience to it. The town was not created according to a single agreed plan. It was negotiated between landowners, developers, traders, hotel proprietors, doctors, councillors, ratepayers, visitors and permanent residents.

Some of the personalities recur with striking regularity. William Bowen Davies campaigned for Llandrindod as the county meeting place, became first chairman of its Local Board and first chairman of its Urban District Council, and eventually saw his own home become the Town Hall. Evan Bufton appears repeatedly in debates over municipal improvement and county administration. Jeffrey Jones rose from comparatively modest beginnings to become a long-serving councillor, chairman and county figure. Elizabeth Duffield brought the commercial world of the great hotels directly into the first UDC elected under the 1894 settlement.

Through people such as these, the commercial, social and political histories of Llandrindod become inseparable.

From spa town to administrative capital

The most important point is that Llandrindod did not suddenly become an administrative centre when Powys was created in 1974.

The process had begun eighty-five years earlier.

The vote of March 1889 brought Radnorshire County Council to the town. The Local Board of 1891 established distinctly urban government. The Urban District Council of 1894 acquired increasing responsibility for the physical and social fabric of Llandrindod. County Buildings established a permanent county presence in 1909. The Gwalia absorbed an expanding administration after the Second World War. The choice of Llandrindod for Powys in the 1970s enlarged a role already deeply embedded in the town.

There is consequently a second history of Llandrindod running alongside the familiar history of the spa.

Private enterprise created much of Victorian Llandrindod. Landowners released ground for development, railway companies made the resort accessible, hoteliers accommodated its visitors and private companies exploited its mineral waters. Yet as the town matured, public authority assumed an ever larger responsibility for maintaining the conditions which allowed it to function.

Eventually the relationship went further. The municipality acquired landscapes and facilities which had once belonged principally to the private resort economy. The Lake and Common became civic property. Recreation and entertainment became matters of municipal investment. Mineral springs and baths came under council control. Roads, water, sewerage, libraries, public health and housing expanded the council’s influence into everyday life.

Then, as the traditional spa economy diminished, another form of public activity helped sustain the town. County government brought permanent offices, professional employment, housing demand and an administrative population. By the late twentieth century local government had become one of Llandrindod’s principal economic functions.

The consequences can still be read across the town. Brynarlais, the Gwalia, County Buildings and County Hall belong to different generations, but each represents a stage in the same development. Even the mayoral chain carried from the old Urban District Council into the Town Council provides a small physical link across the reorganisation of 1974.

Llandrindod Wells was born from water and tourism, but it survived by becoming more than a spa. Civic government first helped organise the new town, then helped improve and manage it, and finally gave it a new administrative role when the age which had created the great hotels had largely passed.

In that sense, local government did not simply govern Llandrindod Wells.

Over more than a century, it became one of the principal forces which made, maintained and ultimately reinvented the town.

Sources and Further Reading

• Contemporary newspaper reports in the South Wales Daily News, 1 April 1889; Brecon and Radnor Express, 29 May 1891; Brecon County Times, 21 December 1894; Radnorshire Standard, 8 August 1906 and 8 May 1909; Brecon and Radnor Express and Carmarthen Gazette, 18 October 1906; Radnor Express, 16 July 1908; and Leicester Pioneer, 22 May 1909.
• Later contemporary reporting in the Western Mail, 15 July 1949; Liverpool Daily Post, Welsh Edition, 15 and 25 November 1972, 16 May 1983 and 21 February 1990; Shropshire Star, 4 July 1985; and South Shropshire Journal, 20 November 1987, 3 November 1989 and 25 May 1990.
• Powys Archives, records of Llandrindod Wells Urban District Council, including Waterworks, Electricity, Housing, Baths and Springs, wartime and post-war development records.
• Powys Archives, records of Radnorshire County Council, including education, school medical services, highways, public assistance and county administration.
• House of Commons debates and parliamentary records relating to the Llandrindod Wells water supply and municipal improvement, including the water dispute of 1893.
• Llandrindod Wells Water Act 1901.
• Llandrindod Wells Urban District Council Act 1905 and subsequent parliamentary material concerning the council’s spa, springs and baths powers in 1920.
• Electricity (Allocation of Undertakings to Area Boards) Order 1948, including the transfer of the Llandrindod Wells Urban District Council electricity undertaking to the South Wales Electricity Board.
• Local Government Acts of 1888, 1894 and 1972, and the Local Government (Wales) Act 1994, for the successive changes to county, urban, district and unitary government.