Former WS Wood department store

Former WS Wood department store, Station Road, Colwyn Bay

If you look down Station Road you will notice that the buildings on the left hand side, between the Central Pub at the top and the Imperial at the bottom, were all designed and built in the same style in the second half of the 19th century. The original buildings on the right hand (east) side were built in a higgledy-piggledy way, all designed differently at the beginning of the 19th century.

In the early 1920s, an entrepreneur called William Stead Wood arrived in Colwyn Bay from Yorkshire. He bought two of the original buildings on the east side of Station Road and opened a department store, selling every conceivable sort of clothing. After about seven years he asked his friend Sidney Colwyn Foulkes to design a new building. This is the building you see today, which was erected on the site of Mr Wood’s original buildings. It was opened in 1933.

The front of the building is clad in Portland Stone, an idea suggested by a Mr Peake, who ran the firm making the high quality Rodex coats. For some years in the 1990s it was owned and run by the Co-op. Today it is home to the Colwyn Bay branch of Cardiff-based clothing retailer Peacocks, which was acquired in 2012 by Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

In 2017 a granite “postcard” celebrating Sidney Colwyn Foulkes’ work was installed on Colwyn Bay prom.

With thanks to Graham Roberts of Colwyn Bay Civic Society

Postcode: LL29 8BU    View Location Map

Website of Peacocks