Newtown Accommodation

More About Newtown

Kerry is three miles east up a valley of its own, with a ridge behind it carrying the old road along the English border. Llanllwchaiarn is the parish on the north bank, over the bridge, and it is counted with Newtown in the town's population. The lanes out that way carry almost nothing.

The Severn runs through the middle of the town and there is a path beside it. Machynlleth and the Dyfi estuary are an hour west on the A489, and Shrewsbury is about the same the other way, over the border in England. Trains run from Newtown to both.

The name is honest enough: the town really was new once. On 17 January 1279 Edward I granted Roger de Mortimer the right to plant a market town in Cedewain, the old Welsh lordship this stretch of the Severn belonged to. Mortimer laid it out beside a riverside chapel dedicated to St Mary, and the charter gave him a market on Tuesdays.

Six centuries later the town produced Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones, who worked out that if people could read a list they could order from it. In 1861 he posted out a catalogue of Welsh flannel and woollens and sent the goods by train. It is generally reckoned to be the first mail-order business in the world.

It worked on a scale nobody expected. By 1880 he had more than a hundred thousand customers in Britain, Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale among them, and Victoria knighted him in 1887. He also patented the Euklisia Rug, an early sleeping bag, and sold sixty thousand of them to the Russian Army.

The Royal Welsh Warehouse still stands on Old Kerry Road, six storeys of red brick you cannot miss coming into town from the south. It holds offices now, so it is one to look at from the pavement rather than go inside.

Tuesday is still market day. Stalls run the length of Broad Street and the High Street from seven in the morning until three, and it is the same day the charter names. Come on a Tuesday if you want to see the town at its busiest.

Oriel Davies, the town's contemporary art gallery, stands at the edge of the town park and is free to walk into, Tuesday to Saturday, ten until four. Theatr Hafren is the town's theatre and concert hall. Both are a few minutes from the middle, and the riverside path is close enough to join on the way back.