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More About Hotels and Inns in Llandudno

Take the cable tramway up the Great Orme, which has run to the summit since 1902, and come down through Happy Valley, which costs nothing. The museum on Gloddaeth Street and the MOSTYN gallery on Vaughan Street are both a short walk back from the front.

The promenade runs between the two headlands, so wherever you are along it the shops, the pier and the sand are a walk rather than a drive. West Shore, round the far side of the Great Orme, is the quiet side and faces the sunset.

Llandudno’s first two seafront hotels both opened in 1854, and one of them was got hold of by cancelling somebody’s bar bill.

St George’s was built for Isaiah Davies, a local man who had inherited the King’s Head public house. The listing record says he allegedly won the prime seafront site by writing off the drinking debts of John Williams, the Mostyn estate’s agent. Whether or not that is the whole story, from 1856 the hotel ran its own omnibus to Conwy station to collect guests off the train.

The Queen’s went up the same year, built by Owen Thomas and leased to a Miss Elizabeth Hersee. Her advertisement in Slater’s Directory of 1856 sets out what a good hotel offered then. It promised rooms for families, tourists and invalids. There were hot, cold and shower baths, and an excellent billiard table.

The bigger hotels came later and mostly by absorption. The Imperial on Gloddaeth Crescent was created in 1872 out of boarding houses put up in 1865. The Tyndale is three former boarding houses knocked together. The Chatsworth, once Lockyear’s Hotel, was joined to four smaller ones beside it. A Llandudno hotel is very often several Victorian houses wearing one name.

Then in 1940 the Government took a great many of them. The Inland Revenue was evacuated from London to Llandudno, the first two hundred civil servants setting up in the Imperial. Before long four hundred hotels, boarding houses and private houses had been requisitioned for the departments and their families.

Most went back to being hotels afterwards. The ones on the Promenade are listed buildings now: the Grand, St George’s, the Imperial, the Queens and the Marine among them. Staying in one is staying in the fabric of the resort, not beside it.

What that gives a visitor today is a seafront of grand Victorian hotels. The tramway, the museum and the shops are all within a walk, and Conwy castle is ten minutes down the road. Venue Cymru stages shows through a nineteen-million-pound refit running to 2028, so there is usually something on.