CARMARTHEN: Council to demolish former Wilko and car park built over tomb of Henry VII’s father

The former Wilko store in Carmarthen is being demolished and the 250-space car park behind it rebuilt, with no decision yet on what goes there instead.

Carmarthenshire’s cabinet approved it unanimously on Monday morning, without debate.

The £2.5m comes from the Welsh Government’s Transforming Towns grant, and the report to cabinet says £1.5m of it must be spent this financial year. On the site’s future, the report says discussions with interested parties are ongoing and no agreement has been reached.

No planning permission is needed. The demolition goes through a Prior Notice of Proposed Demolition, and the car park works fall within the council’s permitted development rights, so a planning notice will be issued but no application made.

A report submitted to the council says that the proposal has not been to its scrutiny committee and no formal consultation has taken place with Carmarthen Town Council. The town’s five county councillors have however been consulted as local members.

For anyone living or trading around Friars Park, the report gives little to plan by. It says there will be a temporary impact on businesses at Merlin’s Walk and on adjoining residents while work is under way, and that communicating with them will be key, but it gives no start date and does not say what the work will involve or how long it will last.

The homes on Spring Gardens sit hard against the car park structure.

A royal tomb, 200 skeletons and a friary under the car park

The clue has always been in the name.

Friars Park sits on the site of Carmarthen Greyfriars, a Franciscan friary first recorded in 1282. When archaeologists dug the site in the 1980s ahead of construction, they uncovered the remains of more than 200 friars and townspeople.

The friary’s choir once held the tomb of Edmund Tudor, father of Henry VII. His remains were moved to St David’s Cathedral when the friary was dissolved in 1538. Sir Rhys ap Thomas, the soldier who helped put Henry on the throne at Bosworth, was buried there too, and now lies in St Peter’s Church in the town.

The store went up on the cleared site in the mid-1980s, with the digs that produced Merlin’s Walk following later in the decade.

Anyone arriving in Carmarthen has driven past the result. The car park is suspended on the hillside above one of the main roads into town, behind a high brick and concrete wall that has faced arriving traffic for four decades.

Tesco traded there until winning permission for its Morfa Lane store in 2003, moving soon after. Wilko took the unit on, and shut in 2023 when the chain collapsed, one of 400 stores lost.

It came down to the roof

Condition surveys found the building needed significant investment, most notably to the roof, before it could be relet. The council put that at around £1m and concluded it was not cost effective, deciding the building had reached the end of its usable life.

The car park, the report says, no longer meets modern parking standards or user expectations. Redeveloping it is presented as a chance to improve parking, upgrade facilities and produce a more attractive asset for the town centre.

Work will be procured through the South West Wales Regional Construction framework, and new or varied traffic orders may be needed to manage the car park afterwards.

The council bought this building to stop it standing empty

Two years ago the argument ran the other way.

The council already owned the freehold, and bought the leasehold in March 2024 with the building standing empty.

Cllr Alun Lenny, cabinet member for resources, defended that purchase in the chamber at the time. “We already own the car park, which has room for 250 cars. The building is in a prime site in Carmarthen town centre and we were anxious not to see it being left empty.”

He was answering Cllr Kevin Madge, who challenged what the building had cost ratepayers and who took the decision, arguing money was going into Carmarthen while schools in Ammanford and Llanelli and the Miners’ Theatre went without. The purchase price has never been published and does not appear in Monday’s report.

Nobody knows what goes there yet

The council is in discussions with interested parties about the future use of the site, but the report is explicit that no agreement has been reached.

Cabinet was told those discussions cover the wider site and will continue.

There is a clock on it. The report says £1.5m of the grant has to be spent in the 2026/27 financial year, and that delivering to timescale is key.

Grant money and old buildings: the town has been here before

The former Debenhams in St Catherine’s Walk, 300 metres away, is being turned into Atriwm, a £40m health, leisure and education hub backed by more grant funding – this time by both UK and Welsh Government. The scheme needed an extra £2m after engineers found a structural defect and has slipped past its 2026 opening target.

This spring Senedd candidates from three parties questioned the council’s town centre spending priorities, contrasting the delayed Carmarthen project with Swansea’s former Debenhams, bought by Swansea Council, stripped out and sold on to the Quadrant’s owners, where fit-out is now under way with tenants yet to be officially announced.

The town centre has been hit hard in recent years, losing Debenhams, Wilko and a string of national chains, with bank branches going the same way and more names still at risk. Against that, Carmarthen High Street was named the second fastest-growing in the UK last year, on a 19% rise in footfall.