Plans for a café and cookery school at a historic Cardiff building have fallen through. Roath Park House, a Victorian property at the entrance to Roath Pleasure Gardens, has been disused for decades.
Once a park keeper's house, the site was renovated by its owner, Cardiff Council, shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, at a reported cost of £575,000. A planning application was approved for a café on the ground floor and a cookery school on the first floor but a council spokesman said the proposal was scrapped during the pandemic when "many cafes and restaurants were closed or operating at limited capacity for significant periods of time".
He told WalesOnline: "Work to make Roath Park House safe, secure and watertight was completed just before the Covid pandemic in March, 2020, and a change-of-use application for commercial purposes was subsequently submitted and approved. During the Covid period the council reviewed options for the property, prior to any further use-specific fitout being undertaken." You can get more Cardiff news and other story updates straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletters here.
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The council has included the building in its latest Annual Property Plan among properties it hopes to lease to "generate a rental income for the council". Its spokesman said the hope was to "ensure this historic building is brought back into use" and a café "could be a good option" but the lease opportunity is not limited to a specific type of business.
Roath Park House was built in 1897 as the residence of Cardiff’s director of parks, who was then William Pettigrew. His brother Andrew took over the role in 1915 and lived in the home until his death in 1936. William Nelmes then filled the post and stayed in the property until 1975. After the Nelmes family left, the house was used as accommodation for other park employees. By the early '80s it was suffering from severe damp and had no adequate heating system.
The house was deemed unsuitable for accommodation in 1982. The council completed more than £60,000 worth of renovation work in 1985 which readied the space for office use. But the property was reportedly empty for decades before more repair work was carried out in the months before Covid hit. The work was not specifically for the cookery school or café, but was "about getting the building watertight/safe etc.", said the council spokesman.
The ground-floor café, which was set to be called Nant Fawr (Big Stream), would have had space for 50 customers with outdoor seating for a further 40. The name was a nod to the Roath Brook which winds through the park. And the first-floor Roath Park cookery school would have allowed groups of eight to take courses two or three times per day.
You can read more about lease opportunities in the Annual Property Plan here. And you can find more of the latest Cardiff news here.
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