Exterior
Belongs to a group of 1-9 Queen's Buildings and Liberties Bar, Station Road, Colwyn Bay.
Red brick with slate roof, blue brick and stone dressings. Each shop is a 2-window range, with single stepped gable. Ground floors largely renewed but some detail from the original shop fronts survives - a number of moulded fascia brackets for example. W H Smith’s has a good example of a Smith’s house style frontage of a type introduced in the 1920’s, with cast iron and glass canopy with stained glass pictorial roundels in the side panels, pictorial tiles to fascia. Cotswold stone stall risers and leaded upper lights in main windows. First floor windows in this building also represent a modification to the original design of the terrace, and are shallow oriel bows. The original design, which survives in the rest of the terrace, has squared oriel windows with scallop tiled lean-to roofs supported on curved brackets to first floor, with brackets, and divided by mullions into 3 lights. Stepped gables divided by outer and central angled corbelled pilasters surmounted by ball finials, and with 2 segmentally arched windows with high set transoms and low reliefs in the tympana.
The lowest building (Liberties Bar) is slightly different in style, and was a later addition to the row, built to incorporate public offices: it has 4-centred arched doorway to left with ogival mullioned overlight, and leaded overlights to inserted window to right, blocked corner door, similar to the main entrance. 3-light mullioned and transomed windows to first and second floors with leaded upper panes, and canted turret as oriel over corner, with 3x2-light mullioned windows, parapet and 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, and the date, 1887 (the building itself is dated 1892 over the left hand window in a raised cartouche above the parapet). Turret terminates in spirelet.