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More About B&Bs and Guest Houses in Tenby

The town became a resort in the eighteen-hundreds, when the railway brought visitors down from the valleys and the tall terraces went up along the cliffs. Many still look straight out over the South Beach.

Through high summer the old streets are given over to people on foot for most of the day. That makes a place this compact far pleasanter than the map suggests, with the harbour, the beaches and the shops all a few minutes apart.

Pigot’s trade directory for 1830 lists twenty-one lodging-house keepers in Tenby. The 1844 edition lists thirty-six. In fourteen years the trade grew by more than two thirds. The town nearly doubled with it, from 1,554 people in 1821 to 2,912 by 1841.

At least fourteen of the thirty-six were women, listed in their own names. They included Ann Adams, Mary Faulkner, Jane Griffiths and the sisters Margaret and Sarah Williams. Their addresses cluster on Norton, High Street, St Julian’s Street and Crackwell Street, the same streets the guest houses are on now.

Some built for the purpose. Rachel Williams put up Lexden House around 1848 and ran it as a lodging house. The listing record says it was designed to include as many lettable rooms as possible. The terrace beside it had gone up a few years earlier, built by a retired sea captain who had made his money commanding an opium fleet in China.

The odd thing is that the town fought the railway. In January 1846 Tenby Corporation recorded itself decidedly opposed to a line being brought within the parish, on the grounds that the station at Saundersfoot was near enough for public convenience.

So for years you arrived by coach. The naturalist Philip Gosse came in 1856 and described the coachmen competing for trade at the railhead, calling out for a little gentleman at half-price. On reaching town, he wrote, his party sallied forth, looked at several lodgings and picked one. No booking, no deposit. You turned up and knocked on doors.

The town changed its mind fast. Nine months after that opposition, in September 1846, the Corporation took out twenty shares in the railway company. The line from Pembroke opened in July 1863 and the Whitland connection in 1866. Within a few years one correspondent was complaining that visitors paid high prices and still put up with rooms that had no sea view.

You can still see what it bought. The Georgian and early Victorian terraces that went up for the visitor trade still stand above the beaches, and plenty of them are letting rooms yet. That is a rare kind of continuity in the holiday business.