T.H. Roberts

T.H. Roberts is a coffee shop in the most atmospheric premises imaginable: the former T.H. Roberts ironmongers in the middle of Dolgellau, an 1886 hardware shop that traded until 1997 and was turned into a café with almost all of its fittings intact. The dark wood shelving, the drawers and counters, the shop's whole Victorian bones are still there, so you drink your coffee and eat your cake surrounded by the ghost of a country ironmonger's. There is real history in it: Dolgellau sat at the centre of the nineteenth-century Welsh gold rush, and T.H. Roberts was where the prospectors bought their panning gear. Now it is where walkers off the Cadair Idris paths and locals in from the square come for generous homemade cakes and a proper brew. Dolgellau is a handsome dark-stone town in southern Snowdonia, and this is its front room. Go for the cake; stay for the building.