Merthyr House was a large highly-decorated four-storey bathstone building with basements and attics which stood at the corner of James Street and Evelyn Street, backing on to Adelaide Place. It had a banded rusticated ground floor above which massive decorated pilasters articulated four-bay facades. One corner of the building was canted and channelled and decorated with a massive cartouche and festoons. Erected in 1918 by E. Turner & Sons Ltd. to the design of Henry Budgen, Merthyr House was occupied by the offices of prominent south Wales coal and shipping companies until it was severely damaged in a fire on Sunday 17 March 1946, the northern part of the building being totally destroyed. It was never rebuilt. Later in the twentieth century the building was renamed Imperial House, but was demolished around the turn of the twenty-first century. The site now stands empty.

(Sources: Victorian Society Tour Notes, VS01/16; Webb, `Merthyr House, James Street & Evelyn Street, Cardiff?, Glamorgan Archives; Discovering Glamorgan's Past)
A.N. Coward, RCAHMW, 13.07.2018