Madam,

It is excellent news that the St David’s Hotel in Harlech is finally being demolished thanks to the efforts and funding provided by Snowdonia National Park, the Welsh Government and Gwynedd Council. It has clearly been quite a long and difficult process to reach this stage and the three bodies should be congratulated on getting the job done.

The demolition will get rid of one of Harlech’s notorious eyesores. The other eyesore is the old Coleg Harlech accommodation block. This 12-storey tower block is on a site adjacent to the hotel and is also in a seriously derelict condition. As yet there are no plans to demolish this building, but it is to be hoped that the authorities will turn their attention to it once the hotel demolition has been completed.

Harlech also faces the potential dereliction of the Coleg Harlech buildings. These buildings were sold by Adult Learning Wales in January for £200,000 and have recently been put back on the market by the new owner for £615,000 (Cambrian News, 26 September). The two main buildings, Wern Fawr and the theatre, are both understood to be in very poor condition and in need of substantial investment to bring them back into useable condition.

I suspect that there will be little appetite from investors to purchase the buildings at anything like the current asking price given their potential renovation costs. Harlech therefore faces the prospect of two more important buildings, both of which are listed, remaining empty for a long period of time and gradually falling further into decay.

Harlech has been very poorly served by investors who have bought up important properties, the hotel, the tower block and the college, and failed to make anything of them. These sites have great potential for the development of a new hotel, apartments and leisure facilities but at the moment there is a clear market failure which is likely to require some form of government intervention to help unlock the development opportunities.

Yours etc, Phil Mills, Harlech.

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