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More About B&Bs and Guest Houses in Llandudno

Walk out along Marine Drive in the morning. It runs five miles round the foot of the Great Orme and is one-way for the first three and a half. There is a toll for cars but none for bicycles, and the ticket covers the summit car park as well, which is worth knowing before you pay twice.

Half an hour takes you a long way from the promenade. Conwy and its walls are ten minutes along the coast. Betws-y-Coed and the forest are about three quarters of an hour up the valley, and Anglesey roughly the same the other way. In the town itself the car can stay where it is, because very little worth seeing is further off than a walk.

Slater’s Directory of 1859 covered this coast but gave Llandudno no section of its own. The town was folded in with Conway, as the directory spelled it. Under Private Apartments there was exactly one entry: Mrs John Froggatt, late of Manchester, at Ty-Gwyn on Marine Parade. She had taken a display advert too, calling Llandudno a fashionable watering place.

Twenty-one years later the same directory gave the town a heading of its own, Lodging House Keepers, running to more than three hundred names. Mostyn Street had the most of them. Madoc Street, Lloyd Street, Church Walks and Chapel Street followed.

By 1895 there were close to four hundred, and the trade had renamed itself. They were no longer lodging houses but Apartments, with Boarding Houses listed separately. Many were entered under women’s own names: Sarah Albon, Ellen Chant, Fanny and Alice Bourne.

Some stayed put for decades. Edward Brookes was keeping 7 Madoc Street in 1880, and was still letting apartments at the same address fifteen years later.

There are fewer now, and the figures are the council’s own. In the ten years to 2019, Conwy county lost ninety-two serviced accommodation businesses, fifty-two of them with fewer than ten rooms. Over the same span self-catering grew by two hundred and fifty-five.

A good deal of the town still costs nothing. Happy Valley is a public park on the side of the Orme, a worked-out quarry given to the town in 1887 for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. The MOSTYN gallery on Vaughan Street is free, Tuesday to Saturday, and Codman’s Punch and Judy has worked the promenade since the 1860s.

Give the first morning to the tramway. It has hauled people up the Great Orme on a cable since 1902, the only one left in Britain on public roads. After that the museum on Gloddaeth Street opens Tuesday to Saturday, and five pounds at the door covers the rest of the year.