Llandudno leans hard into its Alice in Wonderland connection, and a good deal of what is repeated about it does not survive a look at the dates. Alice Liddell really did spend her summers here. The claim that the story was written on the West Shore does not. The town’s answer to both facts is a trail, two different White Rabbits, a team game and an open-top bus, and most of it is still running into the autumn. This page sorts the two apart and then tells you how to actually do the Alice side of town.
Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, first told the Wonderland story on a boat trip on the Isis at Oxford in July 1862, and finished the book in 1863. Both events sit before the Liddells’ Llandudno house was even completed. Historypoints, which records the West Shore memorial, puts the problem plainly: the dates “don’t add up” for the idea that the story was inspired on this shore. There is no diary or documentary record that Carroll ever visited Llandudno.
None of that makes the town’s enthusiasm dishonest. It makes the plaque and a lot of the marketing optimistic. Keep the distinction as you walk round: the family is real, the inspiration story is not backed by evidence, and Llandudno has built its Alice identity on the first half anyway.
Alice Pleasance Liddell did stay in Llandudno. Her family spent their summer holidays at Penmorfa, a house built for them on the West Shore, completed in August 1862. The Finding Alice game operators state that Alice first came in 1861 and that the family spent eleven summers there. That is the genuine part of the connection, and it is why the town has a claim worth making at all.
Penmorfa itself no longer stands. It was later demolished, and the site has no monument to gawk at. What survives is the memorial the town raised for Alice decades after the fact, a short walk from where the house once looked over Conwy Bay. The West Shore article covers that side of the isthmus in detail.
The White Rabbit memorial on the West Shore is a marble statue about 183 cm tall, commissioned by the Alice in Wonderland Memorial Committee and carved by Frederick Forrester. It was unveiled on 6 September 1933 by David Lloyd George, on its original site near the model boating lake. Cadw listed it Grade II on 16 March 1976.
The pedestal carries an inscription commemorating the Liddells’ connection; the Cadw listing records the full text, so you can read it before you go. The listing also records the statue in a sorry state at the time: missing its left arm, ears and bobtail, and kept behind a cage. It has since been renovated, and in 2015 it was moved to its present position. That is the object the Grade II listing protects.
Keep two different rabbits straight or the walk will confuse you. The 1933 marble memorial near Gloddaeth Avenue is the listed one, the one with the Cadw number and the Lloyd George unveiling. Separately, a later wooden White Rabbit figure stands in North Western Gardens, nearer the town centre.
That wooden figure is a different object, not the listed memorial, and plenty of online round-ups treat them as the same thing. When a guide shows you “the White Rabbit”, ask which one. The marble rabbit on the West Shore is the one with the history; the wooden one in the gardens is a more recent addition, and it is best simply described as that.
Visit Conwy promotes a self-guided Alice Trail around the town: 34 points of interest, roughly five miles in total, suitable for all ages and with no fixed start point. The characters you will meet include Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Cheshire Cat. Because there is no set route, you can join it from wherever you are staying and walk as much or as little of it as the day allows.
The trail map costs £3.50 and is sold by the Llandudno Tourist Information Service, which is inside Venue Cymru on The Promenade, LL30 1BB, telephone 01492 577577. Note the address carefully: the information centre is inside Venue Cymru, not in the Victoria Centre. The map price and any route changes are current only as of 2025, so check the Visit Conwy listing for the trail before you rely on a figure from this page.
Conwy County Borough Council relaunched the trail on 19 March 2025, adding a new Mad Hatter’s Table feature in Happy Valley. That is the piece of the trail the council’s own press release names, so it is the one you can be confident of finding. The relaunch is recent enough that older guides will not mention it.
Happy Valley sits on the eastern flank of the Great Orme, below the cable car, and it is worth folding into the walk even if you are not riding up. The cable car and tramway article covers how to get there and what runs on top.
Beyond the two rabbits and the Mad Hatter’s Table, do not assume the rest of the sculpture trail matches any list you remember. Only the Mad Hatter’s Table is verified by the council’s relaunch release, and the wooden rabbit in North Western Gardens is the other figure you can describe with certainty. A full inventory of Happy Valley sculpture is not something this page will recite, because the primary sources do not back one up.
The honest approach is to follow the official map rather than a half-remembered checklist. The 34 points are the ones Visit Conwy has chosen to stand behind, and that is the route that will not send you hunting for a statue that is not there.
If you would rather solve than stroll, Finding Alice is a self-led puzzle trek around Llandudno priced per team, £24.99, taking one and a half to two and a half hours. Start slots run hourly from 9am to 7pm. It is booked by email, and the operator signs off, fittingly, “from the Mad Hatter”; the telephone number is 01492 702848.
The operator’s own material carries the stronger version of the town’s claim — that Alice first came in 1861 and the family spent eleven summers at Penmorfa. Book through the operator and read their current terms rather than assuming the slot or price has not moved since this was written.
Alpine Travel runs an “Alice in Llandudno” open-top hop-on hop-off tour with Alice-themed sculpture and storytelling, and its 2026 season runs 23 March to 1 November. That closing date matters if you are planning a late-autumn visit: after 1 November the tour has no published season to fall back on.
Do not copy a fare from a previous year. Fares and frequencies were not verifiable from a primary page when this was written, so the operator’s own site is the only place to check them. The same applies to the day’s running order, which an open-top operator will adjust to the weather without notice.
The bus tour closes for 2026 on 1 November, so if the open-top ride is on your list, put it before that date. The trail itself has no season; it is a map and a pair of shoes, and the West Shore rabbit is outdoors all year.
Two events bookend the autumn. Llandudno’s fireworks are on Tuesday 27 October 2026 at 7pm on North Shore Beach, free, with a backup of Wednesday 28 October, organised by Llandudno Town Council with Llandudno Pier, Tir Prince and Conwy County Borough Council Events. Then the Llandudno Christmas Extravaganza runs 19 to 22 November 2026, a free four-day street event in town. Both are weather-dependent and both carry their current programmes on the Llandudno Town Council page, so check there rather than treating these dates as final. The Llandudno Pier page and the promenade page put the two events on the ground; the free things to do article covers what costs nothing the rest of the year.