The new Severn Arms was able to quickly build on its well established reputation and expand the service it gave to the community and to visitors. In 1841 an Annual Card and Dancing Assembly in the finest public room in the district’ was instituted and held in early January, known locally as the Penybont Ball.

 
Business can only expand when economic factors and local circumstances are favourable. A number of factors now worked to the advantage of the Inn and its development. Among these were:-



• the stability of a reliable landlord in the Severn family;
• the Penybont Hiring Fairs continued to flourish twice a year;
• the holding of weekly markets on open ground near the hotel;
• the expansion of the shop by the Thomas family from 1799;
• developments in the postal service - the ‘Penny Post’ from 1840;
• the arrival of the railway at Penybont in 1864;
• the transfer of the Magistrates’ Court from the Neuadd to the Inn in Penybont early in the century;
• the building of the Radnorshire Police Headquarters at Penybont in 1859;
• the building of a more reliable suspension bridge in about 1835;
• the moving of the annual races to the new course just across the river from the Severn Arms in 1843.
• the spectacular growth of Llandrindod Wells and other local wells during the Victorian period and consequent visitor increase.

There was also the most important factor of continuity in the landlords of the Severn Arms – just three names from 1841 to 1895, Stevens, James and Wilding, the latter for 30 years from 1869 to the turn of the century. With all these favourable advantages it is no surprise to find that the Severn Arms continued to grow and to flourish during this period.

 
It is clear that Mr John Wilding, who took the tenancy with his wife in 1869, played a very important part in this development. He had earlier built the Builders’ Arms in Crossgates and now moved to Penybont with his family of eight children. With the Inn came also tenancy of the large Cwmtrallwm farm, and this and the gardens and orchard at Penybont provided much of the produce required for the hotel. R.C.B. Oliver in his history of the Hotel Metropole says: ‘Mr & Mrs Wilding continued to up-hold the Severn Arms’ renown as the leading coaching inn in Mid-Wales with the charge also of the local posting services. They had special table ware made carrying a shield within which was the letter ‘W’ surmounted by a device resembling a winged lion. The significance of this device is not now known’. In 1885 John Wilding purchased Coleman’s Hotel in Llandrindod which he renamed The Bridge Hotel. This is the hotel which would later be enlarged and renamed again The Hotel Metropole. After John Wilding’s death the Severn Arms was taken over by one of his sons William Wilding in 1891, who earlier that year had married Miss Mary Edwards, while his brothers took over the Bridge. Day books kept by William Wilding have survived and are now owned by the Griffiths family of Church Farm. These give us a fascinating insight into the life of a landlord/farmer who ‘looked over some of the books at the Severn Arms’ in 1890 and concluded that ‘the place will pay right enough, I think, so I shall have to think now of getting married’. Fortunately he was able to report the same day ‘my girl is willing, so everything seems to be going on alright.’