Bodelwyddan Castle

Bodelwyddan began around 1460 as a manor house built by the Humphreys family of Anglesey. Sir William Williams, Speaker of the House of Commons from 1680 to 1681, bought it from the Humphreys, and from 1690 the house was associated with the Williams-Wynn family for close to two centuries.

The house was remodelled in 1805 in the Greek Revival style, then rebuilt between 1830 and 1832 for Sir John Hay Williams, who brought in the architects Joseph Hansom, inventor of the Hansom cab, and Edward Welch to recast it in the castellated Gothick style, together with a new estate wall and formal gardens. Hansom's work here has been called one of his most ambitious projects, "wildly dramatic and owing nothing to its predecessors."

During the First World War the house served as a recuperation hospital for wounded soldiers, while the estate grounds were used by troops stationed at the nearby Kinmel Camp for trench warfare training; traces of the practice trenches survive. By 1920 the Williams family could no longer sustain the cost of the castle and estate and leased it to Lowther College, a girls' school founded in 1896 at Lytham St Annes in Lancashire by Florence Lindley.

Lowther College bought the property outright in 1925 and is thought to have been among the first private girls' schools to have its own swimming pool, alongside a private golf course; boys were admitted from 1977. The school closed in 1982 after running into financial difficulty.

Clwyd County Council bought the site in the 1980s to develop it as a visitor attraction, and the Bodelwyddan Castle Trust, an independent charity, opened it as a museum in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts, with the interior restored by the Victorian-architecture specialist Roderick Gradidge to house the collections. The portrait gallery opened in 1988 and was named Museum of the Year in 1989, but the National Portrait Gallery partnership ended in 2017 after Denbighshire County Council cut its funding — the same year the council decided to sell the site.

The castle and its 99-year lease were still on the market in February 2019; by June the historic house had closed to visitors, and by August access to the woodlands, parkland, play area and trench experience had ended too, though the independently run hotel on the estate kept trading throughout. In mid-2021 Bourne Leisure Hotels agreed to buy the remaining part of the castle from Denbighshire County Council, intending a full refurbishment and operation through its Warner Leisure Hotels subsidiary, which already ran the hotel on site; the council was to retain the woodland, meadow, car park and agricultural land.