The History of Llandudno

Visitors often assume a seaside resort of Llandudno’s elegance must have grown up slowly, over centuries. It did not. Two hundred years ago there was nothing here but marshland, used for grazing and little else. Everything you see along the promenade today, the hotels, the pier, the ordered curve of the streets, was built in a few remarkable decades. But the land itself has a much older story, and Miss Mostyn thinks you ought to know it before you walk the front.

Long Before the Town

The Great Orme was inhabited some five thousand years ago. The Neolithic burial chamber at Llety’r Filiast has yielded artefacts dating from 3,500 to 2,500 BC, older than Stonehenge, and the iron-age hill fort at Pen-y-dinas, with its fifty or sixty hut circles, dates from around 550 BC. Kendrick’s Cave has given up decorated bones and stone tools going back further still, to the Palaeolithic.

Most remarkable of all is the copper mine near the Orme’s summit, worked from around 1,500 BC and now recognised as the largest ancient mine complex in Western Europe. Bronze Age miners drew blue copper ore from these caverns and blended it with tin brought from Devon and Cornwall, and there is evidence the copper travelled as far as mainland Europe.

A Saint, a Legend, and a Name

The Romans came and went, leaving roads that are now little more than footpaths through the hills. Then, in the sixth century, a monk named Tudno is said to have founded a monastery on the Orme and converted the locals to Christianity, living in a cave with a well of fresh spring water. It is after him that Llandudno is named, Llan meaning parish, and dudno a Welsh mutation of Tudno. Nothing of his original church survives; the font in St Tudno’s dates only from the twelfth century, which by Llandudno’s standards counts as recent.

The name Orme, incidentally, comes from the Old Norse for sea serpent. Approach the headland from the water on a misty day and the name makes perfect sense.

The Great Theft, and the Making of a Resort

For centuries the land that is now the town remained common marshland. That changed in 1845, when it was taken from the commoners under an act of parliament still known locally, without much affection, as Deddf y Lladrad Mawr, the Great Theft Act, and assumed by the Mostyn family. Soon after, the Anglesey architect Owen Williams proposed building a town on the flat isthmus between the two Ormes. The Mostyns funded him, and the grid-patterned streets he laid out, curving gently along the north beach, are largely the streets you walk today. By 1847, barely two years on, the population had already reached a thousand.

A railway link from Llandudno Junction opened in 1858, bringing visitors from the industrial cities of northern England in their thousands. A pier followed in 1859, built partly to load coal for shipping to Ireland. It did not survive its first year.

The Great Storm of 1859

On the night of 25 October 1859, a gale from the north-east drove waves described by witnesses as being like mountains into the new promenade. The brand new pier was destroyed outright, its ticket booth carried by a single wave almost to the Little Orme. Over eight hundred people died around the British coast that night, and more than two hundred ships were lost, among them the Royal Charter off Anglesey. Llandudno’s ambitions of becoming a working seaport went down with it. What remained was the resort, and the town made the most of it.

The Victorian Golden Age

A second, sturdier pier opened in 1877 and still stands today as the fifth longest in Britain, with a brass band once playing daily in the pavilion at its end. Hotels rose along the front to the same graceful proportions you can still see now, protected as they are by conservation rules on the colours their facades may be painted. Queen Victoria herself sent the town a herd of Kashmir goats in 1900, and their descendants still roam the Orme.

The Great Orme Tramway began carrying passengers to the summit in 1902, using funicular cars and engineering that manages a gradient of 1 in 3.7. It still runs on much the same principle today. A separate electric tramway linked Llandudno to Colwyn Bay and Deganwy from 1907 until 1956, when the last car pulled into Greenfield Road under the mayor of Colwyn Bay’s own hand at the controls.

It was at the Penmorfa Hotel, on the west shore below the Orme, that a young Alice Liddell spent her childhood summers, the same Alice who inspired Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. The hotel was demolished in 2009 despite public protest, one of the town’s few genuine losses.

Llandudno Today

The town now numbers some 29,000 residents, including Penrhyn Bay and Penrhynside, and still draws visitors north each summer in numbers that would please even the Mostyns. Of the five theatres Llandudno once supported, only Venue Cymru remains as a working stage. The Victorian street lamps and much of the original grid survive intact, watched over now, as ever, by rising sea levels the town takes rather more seriously than it once did.

Miss Mostyn considers it worth knowing all this before you take your first walk along the front. A view is always better understood with its history attached.