Former Feathers Hotel, Wrexham

Former Feathers Hotel, Chester Street and Charles Street

This corner building, now the Smaczek Polish grocery store, was once a busy coaching inn. You can see remnants of the stables and coach house immediately behind the building on Charles Street.

The Feathers took on its present guise when it was remodelled c.1850. The new façade was continued across the front of the adjoining property on Chester Street – the building you first enter when you walk through the shop door. The surviving structure of the original building here suggests that it was once timber-framed. Its gable end probably faced the street (with the roofline at right angles to the street).

In Victorian times the stable yard was big enough to cater for 30 horses at a time. Frederick Temple was once an ostler here (looking after guests’ horses). He had run away from home c.1874 and led a vagabond’s life. He was working as a cowman at Minera Hall when he received a message in 1899 that his mother had died in South Africa, leaving him a fortune estimated at £600,000. In today’s money, that would be about £66m! He quickly left the cowshed and boarded a ship to Cape Town.

In 1875, a benefit concert was held in Wrexham to raise money for the family of the late James Armstrong, of the Feathers Hotel, who had left his widow and seven small children “totally unprovided for”.

A William Jones was sentenced to a month’s jail with hard labour in 1848 for stealing two towels from what was then known as the Feathers Inn. Pilfering from hotels is not a recent phenomenon!

Postcode: LL13 8BT     View Location Map