Fun, sea and sand, ma’am
From piers to kiss-me-quick hats, Chris Leadbeater salutes the lasting legacy of the Victorian resort
Spend the first May bank holiday weekend of any year in Llandudno, and you may feel that you have tumbled through a hole in history. The dresses will be long, touching the ground, concealing ankles and saving graces; the hats elaborate, perching loftily on heads; the frock-coats elegant. You will see them out on the promenade of The Parade, and on adjacent Mostyn Street, these characters in impeccable attire – skirts swishing, walking canes clicking on the Tarmac. Ignore the cars on the side-streets and it could be the Golden Jubilee summer of 1887, with Victoria marking a full 50 years on the throne, and the entire town in a celebratory mood.
Even if Covid intrudes on the forthcoming festivities, this retro-effect will surely be back – and just as evocative – in 2022. However, as it stands, the Llandudno Victorian Extravaganza is planned for 10 weeks from now, May 1-3 – and the organisers are hoping that the virus will not stop it again. The lockdown weeks of spring 2020 aside, the event has been held every year since 1986, in tribute to the town’s greatest epoch, when tourists poured in from the east, from Liverpool and Manchester, in a rush of newfound freedom.
There can be a tendency to regard the 1950s and 1960s –
when holiday camps were in their knobbly-knee-inspecting heyday, and Billy Butlin was building his brand – as the halcyon era of British domestic tourism. But while this time before cheap flights and last-minute Costa packages was indeed a golden age for getaways on home soil, it was only the second of its kind. The original example had been a century earlier, when the country first discovered two novel, exciting concepts – the brief escape from the workplace, and the seaside locations in which these flights of fancy could be enjoyed.
If there end up being echoes of this in the Covid-constrained summer of 2021 – a January survey of its members by short-breaks specialist Travelzoo revealed that 42 per cent of Britons plan to travel in home pastures at some point this year, as we wait for international restrictions to be lifted – then we will only be following a route taken by our mid-19th century ancestors.
In a sense, those Victorian tourists were pioneers, living through a seismic period when the British seafront began, a little, to move away from the functionality of ports set up purely for trade and the bared teeth of coastal defence. The landscape started to shift, re-baptised in palace hotels, in fantastical structures, in piers – extending into the water like the arms of giddy children reaching out for promised sweets. And trains. For it was the railways that most effected this change, both a contributor to and a consequence of the Industrial Revolution; a spider-web spreading out in the smoke – suddenly capable of delivering thousands of visitors to the beach. The tracks arrived in Brighton and Westonsuper-Mare in 1841, in Great Yarmouth in 1844, in Blackpool in 1846, in Weymouth in 1857, in Bournemouth in 1870. A new game was afoot, and the possibilities were endless.
Though not immediately. In the 1840s, tourism was, at most, a lofty aspiration – after all, when Thomas Cook was founded in 1841, its purpose was to take religious-minded travellers on journeys that would tend to their souls, not day-trippers on to the sand. But a seed was being planted. You can see it – as you can so much of the Victorian era – in the work of Charles Dickens. The author spent a weekend in Great Yarmouth, for leisure, in 1849. The experience would seep into the semiautobiographical David Copperfield, and the hero’s own surprised admiration for the town. “When we got into the street… and smelt the fish, and pitch, and oakum and tar – and saw the sailors walking about, and the carts jangling up and down over the stones – I felt I had done so busy a place an injustice,” he says, in the passage where he meets the Peggotty family. “I said as much to [Daniel] Peggotty, who heard my expressions of delight with great complacency, and told me it was well known that Yarmouth was, on the whole, the finest place in the universe.”
This sentiment would be repeated in many coastal places as, over the next 20 years, working Britons – the miner, and the millworker – cottoned on to the joys of the seaside.
The train scythed into Llandudno in 1858, with the construction of the Chester and Holyhead Railway along the very top of Wales, and the simultaneous opening of two stations – Llandudno Junction on the mainline, and Llandudno itself at the end of a three-mile branch-line to the beach – in October. This coincided with the appointment of George Felton, the architect who would oversee a 20-year development (18571877) of Llandudno at the behest of the Mostyn Estate – the local aristocratic landowners, who had ambitious plans to turn the town into a resort. This was the start of something special.
You could make an argument for anywhere from Torquay to Morecambe being the blueprint for the Victorian holiday oasis, but Llandudno is the perfect case study. It had the sweat-andgrime backstory – in the 1840s, the prime use for the Great Orme was the resurrected Bronze Age copper mine sliced deep into its torso. But this distinctive 679ft headland was (and is) also part of a vista of considerable splendour – the beach curving away below, east along Llandudno Bay. Things moved speedily under Felton’s gaze. The Parade was laid out; a short pier was added in 1858. It would be superseded in 1877 by the Grade II listed wonder that still stretches out into the Irish Sea for almost half a mile – its idiosyncratic twin entrances running down both sides of the Grand Hotel.
It was a huge success. It would be an error to mistake the Victorians’ love of local travel for personal liberation; the propriety and prudery of the era were still there, even in these hours of relaxation, as evidenced by the proliferation of “bathing machines” – enclosed carts that “permitted” women to change unseen into the most modest forms of swimwear, and be pulled out into the waves beyond prying eyes. But they came in large numbers – to watch Professor Codman’s Punch & Judy Show on the pier (a spectacle that, part of the fabric of Llandudno since 1860, can still be glimpsed today), and the musical entertainments played out alongside it. The latter were so popular that a whole venue had to be built to host them – the Pavilion Theatre opened by the pier’s south entrance in 1886.
Most inventive was the treatment of the Great Orme – which phoenix-rose from lumpen lighthouse station to beauty spot. A footpath was cut around its flanks in 1858, unlocking the headland’s
‘It was well known that Yarmouth was, on the whole, the finest place in the universe’
geography for those who wished to admire it. This was widened into a carriageway, to allow for horse-drawn rides, in 1878 – 20 years before the commissioning of the latest technology, the Great Orme Tramway, which trundled to the summit via cablehauled narrow gauge. Nor did the Mostyn Estate halt at transport links. The “Happy Valley” was inaugurated for the Golden Jubilee, its botanical gardens slipped on to the crag’s southeast slope. And while Victoria died in 1901, the momentum didn’t. The Grand Hotel emerged, upgraded, from the former Baths Hotel in 1902; the Llandudno and Colwyn Bay Electric Railway sent trams eight miles along the seafront as of 1908 – drawing Rhos-onSea, as well as the termini, into the ongoing Edwardian party.
It couldn’t last. As with so much, a gun fired in Sarajevo killed the good times. But plenty of what was born of the first golden age of British domestic tourism – in Llandudno and the wider UK (see right) – survived the First World War, and remains in the present.
True, there have been casualties. Llandudno’s Palace Pavilion drifted into disrepair, and was derelict when it was eviscerated by fire in 1994; the Electric Railway closed in 1956, unable to compete with the car. And yes, the tone of domestic tourism has faded, from one of smiling optimism to dowdy familiarity. But the Great Orme retains its greatness – its Happy Valley rebooted with an artificial ski slope and Wales’s longest toboggan run; a cable-car gliding to the top – while the town at its foot salutes its memories every May. And if you find yourself at the festival, take a moment to stroll away from the crowds, to the headland’s quieter West Shore, where a statue of a white rabbit is another recollection. It remembers that Alice Liddell – the supposed inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s most feted character – spent childhood holidays here between 1862 and 1871. If the UK has a second consecutive summer at home, such locations may yet prove to be our Wonderland.