Homes Under the Hammer host Martin Roberts has won a planning bid to open his own pub in a Welsh village – after snapping up the once-derelict watering hole without telling his wife.
TV star Roberts, 61, described the fixer-upper project as a ‘bonkers plan’ after buying the Hendrewen Hotel in July 2022 for a reported £200,000 with no prior experience in the hospitality industry.
He also admitted he didn’t tell wife Kirsty about the ‘accidental’ purchase in the village of Blaencwm, Rhondda, almost exactly halfway between Swansea and Cardiff.
But Roberts – and his spouse – may well be breathing a sigh of relief after he was given the green light by council officials to transform the former hotel into a gastropub with luxury accommodation.
It is his second such venture after he turned a nearby farm into a B&B – but this time, he is being followed around by cameras for a possible TV series.
Homes Under The Hammer star Martin Roberts has succeeded in securing permission to open a new gastropub in the Welsh valleys
He snapped up the former Hendrewen Hotel last year – despite admitting he has no experience running a hospitality business
Martin is patron of the Rhondda Tunnel Society, a project aiming to reopen a disused railway tunnel for cyclists (pictured on a visit to the tunnel)
Martin can now press ahead with redeveloping the derelict hotel after ‘accidentally’ buying it
Roberts bought the Hendrewen after falling in love with the Rhondda Tunnel Society, a project to reopen a disused railway line under a mountain as a cycle path linking two Welsh valleys together.
He was given full planning consent by Rhondda Cynon Taf Council to extend, redevelop and refurbish the entire hotel and beer garden.
The ambitious plans also include developing a two-storey detached bedroom block containing six disabled bedrooms, as well as a village shop, and an activity storage building.
A planning report on its approval said: ‘The proposed works would create an attractively designed development, providing additional tourist bed space and facilities of a scale appropriate to the size of the site and its location.
‘The development would secure the future of the business, be beneficial to both locals and visitors, and would support(…) the rural economy and its communities.’
Speaking previously, Roberts said: ‘It just cried out to me and I just thought I want to take that on, I want to renovate it, I want to turn it into a place that people would want to come to.’
Roberts was backed in the plans by funding from Welsh Government body Business Wales although he says he had to dig deep into his own pockets.
He said: ‘I am ploughing so much money and so much time and so much effort into this, it’s really scary, really daunting.
‘There are times that I wake up in the night in a cold sweat because I know I’ve got to do this for the community – I’ve got to do it, and I will do it, but every day there’s a list as long as your arm of problems to solve.’
He said that if successful, the Rhondda Tunnel would enable people to cycle it was ‘basically be quicker to cycle from Rhondda to Swansea than it is now to drive it’.
‘It’s an amazing thing and it doesn’t need a whole lot of money,’ he said.
Roberts has recently opened up on the effects a near-death experience had on his mental health after he underwent emergency heart surgery in 2022.
He had been told he had hours to live after finding out he was suffering from pericardial effusion – a dangerous build-up of fluid around the heart – and was rushed into lifesaving surgery.
In an interview with The Mirror he confessed: ‘I can’t understate the mental after-effects of what happened to me. The physical stuff you get over, but it’s the overriding thought it could have all ended.
‘Everything you tried to do, and your family, you realise it could all be gone. I was told I needed to slow down and I’ve gone the other way. Hopefully I’ve got many years but you never know.
‘That whole thing that happened to me makes you realise how thin a thread we dangle from. But you can’t go through life living in that fear.’
