Why Penmorfa Was Built
The story of Penmorfa begins with a family's first encounter with Llandudno. At Easter 1861, Dean Henry Liddell — Alice's father, then Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, and one of the most distinguished classical scholars in Victorian England — brought his family to Llandudno for the first time. They stayed at Tudno Villa, a lodging house on North Parade in what is now the site of the St Tudno Hotel. Something about the town clearly impressed the Dean, because the family returned the following year.
In 1862 the Liddells stayed at the St George's Hotel on West Shore. The quieter, more sheltered aspect of West Shore, facing the Conwy estuary rather than the open Irish Sea, appears to have particularly appealed to them. Dean Liddell took the decision to commission a house on this shore rather than continue renting accommodation. The house that resulted was Penmorfa: a mock Gothic structure completed in 1862, its name a Welsh compound meaning roughly "headland shore" or "sea-headland."
The choice of mock Gothic as an architectural style was typical of the period and of Liddell's academic background. Christ Church, Oxford is itself an exercise in Gothic architecture, and the Dean's daily professional environment was surrounded by pointed arches, carved stonework and the visual vocabulary of the medieval. Penmorfa was a holiday home, not an academic statement, but the style was natural to a man of Liddell's formation.
Life at Penmorfa: 1862 to 1873
The Liddell family used Penmorfa for Easter, summer and Christmas holidays across eleven years. For Alice, who was nine in 1862 and twenty-one in 1873, this meant that a very significant portion of childhood and adolescence was spent at West Shore. She described, in her 1933 letter, "the happiest memories of Penmorfa" and "the rambles over the Great Orme's Head and among the Llandudno sand hills" — specific landscapes recalled in detail sixty years later.
The house was substantial enough to attract distinguished guests. William Gladstone visited Penmorfa — Gladstone represented the Flint Boroughs constituency nearby, giving him political as well as social reason to maintain connections in North Wales, and he had an established friendship with Dean Liddell. The poet and critic Matthew Arnold also visited. The combination of the Dean's academic eminence, his Oxford social networks, and the fashionable character of Llandudno as a resort made Penmorfa a place where significant Victorian figures might reasonably appear.
The house also stands at the centre of the most tantalising question in the Llandudno Alice story: did Lewis Carroll visit? The evidence is examined in detail on the Lewis Carroll page, but the key item is a photograph in the album Carroll gave to Alice, apparently showing a man at Penmorfa who has been identified as "almost certainly Lewis Carroll" by the Llandudno and Colwyn Bay History Society. The same album contains a photograph taken from the zigzag path behind the house.
The Photograph Album and the Figure at the Door
Lewis Carroll was one of the most accomplished early photographers in England. He took his camera everywhere, produced technically sophisticated work, and used photography as both an artistic and a social practice. The album of photographs he gave to Alice is therefore not merely a sentimental keepsake but a document of Carroll's photographic output in the relevant years.
Within that album, a photograph appears to show Penmorfa — probably taken around 1863, judging by what is known of the Liddells' movements and Carroll's diary entries. A figure in the photograph is shown in what has been described as an "artistic pose." John Lawson-Reay of the Llandudno and Colwyn Bay History Society identified this figure as "almost certainly Lewis Carroll." The same album contains a photograph taken from the zigzag path behind Penmorfa, which is characteristic of the kind of viewpoint a skilled photographer would seek.
Neither photograph has been the subject of published expert photographic analysis. The album's current location — it was eventually sold by Alice's family along with other effects from Cuffnells — is not publicly documented in easily accessible sources. This is one of the key pieces of archival work that would significantly advance the historical record: if the album can be located and the figure formally analysed, the Carroll visit question might be settled.
After 1873: Gogarth Abbey Hotel and Beyond
In 1873 the Liddell family sold Penmorfa. The reasons are not documented in easily accessible sources, but the practical explanation is that Alice was now twenty-one and the pattern of family holidays that had brought the Liddells to Llandudno was changing. The eleven years of Penmorfa were over.
The house passed through subsequent ownership and became the Gogarth Abbey Hotel. As a hotel it would have served the growing Victorian and Edwardian tourist market in Llandudno — a resort that continued to flourish through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Alice connection was presumably known locally but was not the dominant element of the hotel's identity during this period.
During the Second World War, Penmorfa was used as an officers' mess for a coastal gunnery school stationed in the area. This is a reminder of how thoroughly the war repurposed civilian and domestic buildings across Britain — and how a house that had once hosted a future Prime Minister was now serving a very different purpose in very different circumstances.
The most incongruous chapter came in the 1970s, when Penmorfa became the filming location for some of the PG Tips chimpanzee television advertisements — one of the most popular advertising campaigns in British television history. The contrast between the Gothic holiday home of a Victorian Dean of Christ Church and its use as a set for advertising tea with performing chimpanzees is considerable.
The 2008 Demolition
By the early 2000s, Penmorfa — by then considerably altered from its 1862 appearance — had become derelict. In 2008, Anwyl construction demolished it. The demolition did not happen without opposition: there was a large local campaign to save the building, making the case that a structure so closely associated with Alice Liddell and with a significant chapter of Victorian literary history deserved preservation rather than clearance.
The campaign failed. Penmorfa was demolished in 2008 and the site at West Shore, in the postcode area LL30 2QY, has remained undeveloped since. There is no building to visit. The loss is significant not because Penmorfa was architecturally distinguished — by the time of its demolition it had been much modified — but because a physical connection to Alice Liddell's childhood, one of very few remaining in the world, was removed rather than conserved.
The undeveloped site today is a curious place: an empty space where a significant house once stood, overlooking a bay that Alice described with warmth eighty years after she last walked to it as a child. The White Rabbit statue, nearby at West Shore, serves as the public memorial that the house itself can no longer provide.
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