I knew when researching ideas for this trip that I wanted to visit some places I hadn’t been to before and that I wanted to visit somewhere relating to animals. On our previous trip we went to the Welsh Mountain Zoo which is excellent but basically impossible to get to by public transport. But my researches lead me to Bodafon Farm Park which I hadn’t come across any mention of on our last visit to Llandudno.
Llandudno’s promenade is approximately two miles long and is a great place for a walk with historic buildings and hotels on one side and the sea and the sands on the other. I’d walked part of the promenade along the North Shore nearest the Pier on a previous trip but this time I also walked to near the end of the promenade as I went to visit a farm nearby (more of which next time).
The Llandudno Museum and Gallery is another place we missed out on visiting on our previous trip to the town so I made sure to explore it this time around. The museum has six permanent galleries that tell the history of Llandudno from its very earliest beginnings up to the modern day. Adult tickets are £6.
The Home Front Museum was one of two musuems in Llandudno that we’d considered visiting on our last trip but ran out of time so I made sure to fit them both in this time round. Opened in 2000 in a building that had been requisitioned during the Second World War by the Auxiliary Fire Service from a garage run by a Frank Meredith and his sons, it houses a collection of artefacts highlighting life on the home front during the Second World War with a partiulcar focus on life in Llandudno.
After I booked my trip to Conwy due to several factors including train strikes being on and off again because of the Queen’s funeral I ended up extending my stay in Wales in order to avoid the worst of the travel chaos. I had considered going somewhere new but since I was booking so close to when I was travelling I wasn’t left with a lot of reasonably priced options so I decided to go back to Llandudno which benefited from being a place I really like and an easy half hour bus journey from Conwy.
MOSTYN Art Gallery – the building on the right in the below picture – is a contemporary art gallery in Llandudno, Wales. The history of the gallery begins in 1895 in Conwy with the Gwynedd Ladies’ Art Society. They asked the philanthropist and photographer Lady Augusta Mostyn to secure new premises for them and this building became the home of the society from 1901 to 1903. Women were not permitted in the male artist’s societies so this is possibly the first art gallery dedicated to exclusively exhibiting work by female artists in the world. Interestingly that wasn’t the original intention of Lady Augusta who wanted it to be a space for local people to use (many of the Society members were actually based elsewhere in the UK) and eventually the Society was asked to leave.
Inspired by The Red Phone Box Travels posts about doors, here are some interesting doors found around Llandudno in Wales. The first picture is of a side door to Gloddaeth Church which has some pretty stained glass windows.
Originally a gas lamp, which was invented from around 1807, a lamplighter would have rested his ladder against the specially constructed set of horizontal bars, as they lit the flame at dusk and then again in the morning as they extinguished it.
Some of the first post boxes in the UK, dating from around 1866, were hexagonal in shape, like this one by the promenade in Llandudno with a cap that is decorated with acanthus leaves and which was designed by J W Penfold.
The Llandudno War Memorial commemorates those who died in both World Wars. It’s a large obelisk with a golden ball at the top that was first unveiled in 1922. It was designed by Sidney Colwyn Foulkes.
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