In the 1840s this was a small mining settlement on a limestone headland, a thousand people scratching a living from the Great Orme copper mines and a little subsistence farming. By 1861 the same place was being called 'the Queen of the Welsh Watering Places.' What happened in those twenty years was Lord Mostyn. The Mostyn Estate owned almost everything on the isthmus, and in 1848 the Liverpool architect Owen Williams presented Lord Mostyn with a plan: drain the marshland behind the bay, lay out a grid of broad streets and a long curving promenade, build hotels along the seafront, and turn this corner of north Wales into a resort to rival anything on the English coast. Mostyn pursued the plan with enthusiasm. The architect George Felton took over in 1857 and built most of central Llandudno over the next twenty years. Almost everything you see between the promenade and the back streets dates from then.
Llandudno's shape is the work of geology rather than planning. The town sits on a narrow isthmus between the mainland and the Great Orme - a limestone headland 207 metres high at the summit, mostly owned by the Mostyn Estates and home to wild Kashmiri goats descended from a pair given by the Shah of Persia to Queen Victoria and passed on to Lord Mostyn. The goats roam the headland and, regularly, the main streets of the town - during the 2020 pandemic lockdown they became internationally famous for wandering through deserted Llandudno. The Great Orme has the longest toboggan run in Britain at 750 metres, and a cable car that runs to the summit. The Little Orme, smaller and more rugged, anchors the eastern end of the bay. Between them runs Llandudno Bay's perfect curving sweep, two miles long, framing the Victorian promenade that the town built for it.
The Great Orme Tramway, which still runs from the town centre up to the summit, is Great Britain's only remaining cable-operated street tramway. The cars are hauled up the steep limestone by underground cables in two sections, with a transfer halfway. The system opened in 1902 and uses methods more typical of a San Francisco cable car than a British tramway. Other transport relics layer the town. The Llandudno and Colwyn Bay Electric Railway ran an electric tramway from 1907 to 1956 between Llandudno, Rhos-on-Sea and Colwyn Bay; the route went up the middle of Gloddaeth Street and along Mostyn Street. The mainline branch from Llandudno Junction opened in 1858, specifically to carry holidaymakers to the new resort. The branch is still active, half-hourly to Llandudno Junction, some trains continuing inland to Blaenau Ffestiniog or east to Manchester Airport.
The West Shore, a quieter beach on the estuary of the Conwy, was where Alice Liddell - the real Alice of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland - spent the long summer holidays of her childhood. The Liddell family had a holiday home called Pen Morfa here in the 1860s. Carroll himself never visited Llandudno, despite a persistent local legend; but a White Rabbit statue on the West Shore commemorates Alice's connection. The North Shore is the main resort beach, busy with a 700-metre Victorian pier built in 1877, the listed Grand Hotel built where the old Baths Hotel had stood, and a row of hotels along The Parade. Llandudno Pier was extended landwards in 1884; in 1897 the Llandudno Urban District Council bought Marine Drive - the four-mile carriage road around the Great Orme that follows a footpath laid out in 1858 by Reginald Cust, a Mostyn trustee.
In 1890 Elisabeth of Wied, Queen Consort of Romania - better known by her writing pseudonym Carmen Sylva - spent five weeks in Llandudno and described Wales on leaving as 'a beautiful haven of peace.' Translated into Welsh as hardd, hafan, hedd - beautiful, haven, peace - the phrase became the town's official motto. The Victorian era folded into the Edwardian gracefully here: the National Eisteddfod was held in 1864, 1896 and 1963, and Llandudno took its turn at most of the cultural set-pieces of the Welsh-speaking nation. Matthew Arnold wrote of the place at length in the preface to On the Study of Celtic Literature in 1867. The novelist Arnold Bennett set scenes of The Card here in 1911. Llandudno produced the boxer Randolph Turpin, who briefly held the world middleweight title in 1951 and later lived in the Summit Hotel atop the Great Orme. Australia's seventh Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, was schooled in Llandudno as a child.
Llandudno carries two darker connections in its civic memory. The town is twinned with Wormhout, a small Flemish town ten miles from Dunkirk: in May 1940 members of the Llandudno-based 69th Territorial Regiment were ambushed there, taken prisoner, and on 28 May massacred by SS troops at nearby Esquelbecq. The town is also linked to Mametz, in the Somme, where the 38th Welsh Division - whose 1st North Wales Brigade had been raised and trained in Llandudno - was ordered to take Mametz Wood in July 1916. Two days of fighting destroyed the village. After the war the people of Llandudno, including returning survivors, contributed generously to its rebuilding. The Welsh National Memorial at Mametz - a great red dragon facing east, claws extended - was raised by donations including those of this town. A seaside resort is also a place where soldiers grew up and returned, or did not.
Llandudno sits at 53.32 north, 3.83 west, on the Creuddyn peninsula between the Great Orme to the west and the Little Orme to the east. From the air the bay is a clear two-mile curve of beach with the promenade along its length and the two limestone headlands bracketing it. Best viewed at 1,500 to 3,000 ft AGL flying along the North Wales coast. Nearest airports: RAF Valley (EGOV) on Anglesey, Caernarfon (EGCK), Hawarden (EGNR) east toward Chester. The pier extends seaward from the North Shore; the West Shore beach faces the Conwy estuary.
53.32°N, 3.83°W. Seaside town between Great Orme and Little Orme on the Creuddyn peninsula. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 ft AGL. Nearest airports: EGOV Valley, EGCK Caernarfon, EGNR Hawarden.