There has been a hotel on or near this site since 1709; the present hotel was built in 1881 or 1887. It is a large, four-storey building with two attic storeys in the Mansard roof, in the French Renaissance style, and with ground floor shops. There is a Regency entrance, within the existing porch, with fluted painted ironwork. The entrance hall has granite columns with floral capitals and corbels. The interior retains a particularly good set of well-preserved public rooms in Renaissance style and there is a richly decorated wooden staircase in Jacobean style.
In November 1839, the previous hotel was the site was the site of the confrontation between the Chartists and troops, known as the Newport Uprising (nprn 405003), when more than twenty men were shot dead. According to tradition, holes in the porch columns were caused by Chartist bullets, but this seems unlikely as the present hotel was not in existence at the time.
RCAHMW, 01 March 2010.

A newspaper article announcing the re-opening of the Westgate Hotel in 1887 noted that `The old building will be remembered by everyone who has seen Newport, and the old pillars, which were perforated by Chartist bullets, are the only things now left of the original pile. These have been utilised by the architect of the present building in the vestibule of the hotel, where they are doing duty as supports to the ornamental moulding. The bullet holes still remain, and the old pillars are preserved intact.? The presence of Chartist bullet holes in the modern entrance pillars therefore seems possible, although it has also been suggested that the holes are railing holes rather than bullet holes.

(Source: `The New Westgate Hotel at Newport?, The Western Mail, 07.05.1886, p. 3, accessed via Welsh Newspapers Online; information provided by Newport Museum)
A.N. Coward, RCAHMW, 20.06.2019