Located literally opposite the Travelodge in Newport is the Queen’s Hotel, a former JD Wetherspoon venue which they sold in 2021.
I have stayed here before back in 2018, so I have some photos of the inside. The history on their website noted:
“A grade II listed building, previously the Queen’s Hotel, this three-storey premises opened in 1863, soon after Bridge Street was laid out. Named after the reigning monarch, Queen Victoria, it dominated the western end of Bridge Street which soon became known as Queen’s Square.”
The bar as it looked back in the halcyon days of March 2018 and there were a good number of real ales on.
The standard JD Wetherspoon breakfast and, in this case, an overcooked egg…
The single room that I booked.
The view from the hotel room window and I accept that it’s not the sort of vista that would cause a Romantic poet to start trembling near the curtains or something similar, but it could be worse.
The room plan and I remember from the time that this didn’t feel like a typical Wetherspoon hotel, they had by that time started to have grander rooms in either purpose built extensions or they had been heavily renovated. They hadn’t done that here, they’d just tidied up the existing rooms and did the best with what they had which is a noble British tradition and also the basis for about half of the country’s hospitality industry.
I didn’t take carpet photos back in 2018, as I obviously didn’t know how to live, but at least it’s visible in this photo.
I remember that the pub was a Lloyds so they had music and were showing sports, with the whole arrangement not really fitting into the broader chain’s dynamic. I’m not entirely surprised that they sold this venue, it seemed an odd fit in many ways. They never reopened up after the lock-down in Wales required pubs to close and it sold for nearly a million pounds, but successive operators have struggled with it and I think that it’s currently entirely closed. Anyway, hopefully it will open again at some stage but it’ll be hard for any operator to make it as busy as it was when JD Wetherspoon managed it.