Laugharne, Carmarthenshire
THE iconic Brown’s Hotel in Laugharne, made famous as the favourite drinking haunt of poet Dylan Thomas, is get a new life as a boutique hotel and conference centre.
Carmarthenshire Council’s planning committee has agreed to plans being put forward by a business consortium for the 257-year-old listed building.
Brown’s, in King Street, Laugharne, attracts Dylan Thomas fans from across the globe to see black and white pictures of the poet complete with beer, cigarettes and his fiery and equally bibulous wife Caitlin.
Among those who have made pilgrimages to the hotel’s wood-lined bar are ex-US President Jimmy Carter, former James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan and Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.
And in 1972 Brown’s had a new crowd of regulars including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter O’Toole, Glynnis Johns, Sian Phillips and Victor Spinetti who were making the film version of Thomas’s whimsical radio play about Laugharne, Under Milk Wood.
Under the new proposals, the building will boast 11 bedrooms most of which will be in Clarence House, a building next door which now forms part of the licensed premises.
The aim is to allow Thomas fans to have a chance to stay at Brown’s. And as part of the ambitious plans, a new conference centre will be incorporated in the building and the public bar of the hotel will be refurbished and restored.
Swansea-born Thomas first made himself at home in the “snug” bar of the ancient hostelry in the 1930s when he and Caitlin brought up their children in the town’s estuary-side boathouse.
He called the seaside town “a legendary, lazy little black-magical bedlam by the sea”.
He added: “It is a forgetful, important place of herons, cormorants, castle, chapel, gills, ghosts, geese, feuds, scares, cherry trees, jackdaws-in-chimneys, skeletons in the cupboard, bats in the belfrey, pubs, mud, cockles, flatfish, curlews and rain.”
Ex-landlord Tommy Watts, who sold Brown’s to Men Behaving Badly actor Neil Morrissey in 2004 for £650,000, said: “Dylan would sit in a corner with a pint listening to the locals going on at each other and he’d be writing things down.
“Everyone in Laugharne at the time thinks Under Milk Wood is based on what they used to say in the bar.”
Morrissey has now sold his interests in Laugharne, which once included the Hurst House Hotel and the New Three Mariners’ pub.
Wales on line, 14th August 2009
