Queens Buildings and Liberties Bar (No. 6 of 9 buildings)

The Queens Buildings and Liberties Bar, number 6 of a group of nine buildings on Station Road, Colwyn Bay, dates from the late 19th century and is constructed of red brick with a slate roof, featuring blue brick and stone dressings. The building is a two-window range with a single stepped gable. The ground floor shop fronts have largely been renewed, although some original details remain, including moulded fascia brackets. The shop now occupied by W H Smith’s has a prominent, well-preserved frontage in the distinctive Smith’s house style introduced in the 1920s. This features a cast iron and glass canopy with stained glass pictorial roundels in the side panels and pictorial tiles to the fascia. The main windows have Cotswold stone stall risers and leaded upper lights. The first-floor windows represent a departure from the original terrace design; they are shallow oriel bows, while the remaining buildings in the terrace have squared oriel windows with scallop tiled lean-to roofs supported on curved brackets and are divided into three lights by mullions. The stepped gables are marked by outer and central angled corbelled pilasters surmounted by ball finials, and contain two segmentally arched windows with high set transoms and low reliefs in the tympana.

The Liberties Bar, the southernmost building, is of a slightly different style and was a later addition, built to incorporate public offices. It features a four-centred arched doorway on the left, an ogival mullioned overlight, leaded overlights to an inserted window, a blocked corner door, and mullioned and transomed windows to the first and second floors, with leaded upper panes. A canted turret acts as an oriel over the corner and has three by two-light mullioned windows, a parapet, and a frieze. Stone panels set into the parapet are inscribed with the names of the Denbighshire County Council, the National and Provincial Bank of England Ltd, and the Colwyn Bay and Pwllycrochan Estate Company, along with the date 1887. A later, raised cartouche above the left-hand window bears the date 1892. The turret terminates in a spirelet.

The interior of the W H Smith’s shop retains significant features of their house style from the 1920s, including 17th-century style plasterwork to ceilings, such as cable moulding and low relief shields depicting thistles, alongside further low relief plasterwork in the friezes and above the staircase, with mock timber walling to the stairs. The building has been largely modernised.