hotelThe Hotel Inspector · Season 1, Episode 2 · Aired October 5, 2005
Hanmer Arms
Wrexham County Borough
It is still up and running.
On the show
Season 1, Episode 2 · October 5, 2005 · inn
revisited in "The Hotel Inspector: Revisited" special (2006)
What happened after
19th century inn on 6 acres, actively trading with current 2026 bookings.
What happened on the show
Keith and Val Morris had bought the Hanmer Arms three and a half years before Ruth Watson arrived, a substantial 23-bedroom pub, hotel, restaurant and conference operation in Wrexham County Borough. The catch was the money: family members had ploughed roughly a million pounds into the venture and now wanted to see a return that the trading simply was not producing. Watson's task was less a rescue from squalor than a reckoning with scale, because a business this large forgives nothing when the rooms and the function trade run soft. She pushed the couple to run the place as the serious commercial concern it was rather than a labour of love, tightening the offer across all its competing arms so the investment could finally start earning. The property drew a follow-up in the 2006 Revisited special, a sign the show saw enough of a turning point to check back on the Morrises.
After the cameras left
The Hanmer Arms did more than survive; it thrives. As of the latest 2026 check it trades actively as The Hanmer, a nineteenth-century inn set in six acres, taking current bookings through its own site and the usual platforms, and sitting top of its local specialty-lodging listings with a five out of five rating on TripAdvisor. For a business that once needed a television intervention to justify a seven-figure family stake, two decades of continuous trading counts as an emphatic vindication.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.