Rhyl has a reputation that precedes it, and not always fairly. Behind the peeling amusement arcades and the closed SC2 hoardings there are things worth knowing about — a classical music programme that has been running since 1947, the first purpose-built children's theatre in Britain, a miniature railway that has circled the Marine Lake continuously since 1911, and a local history community that would put many larger towns to shame. These are Rhyl's diamonds in the rough.
Rhyl Music Club
Founded in 1947, Rhyl Music Club has been staging professional classical music concerts in the town for nearly eighty years. It is the only organisation in North Wales running a full season of twelve concerts per year, and it does so in the main auditorium of Rhyl Town Hall on alternate Wednesdays at 7.30pm.
The club's history is genuinely remarkable. In 1953 it brought Marcel Dupré — one of the greatest organists of the twentieth century — to St Asaph Cathedral. The same season featured the Mozarteum of Salzburg in a capacity-audience all-Mozart concert at the Pavilion. For decades the club collaborated with the Welsh Arts Council to bring full orchestral concerts to the town.
Today the programme covers chamber music and vocal recitals, performed by professional artists at a professional standard. Ticket prices are modest. The audience is loyal. It is a cultural institution operating in a town that has lost many institutions, and it continues to operate with the quiet determination of people who believe Rhyl deserves better than it gets.
Details of the current season at rhylmusic.com.
Rhyl Little Theatre
The Rhyl Little Theatre was founded by Joseph Holroyd in 1944 as the Rhyl Children's Theatre Club — a project to give local young people the chance to participate in theatrical production. It is, depending on how you count these things, the first purpose-built children's theatre in the United Kingdom: in 1962, Flintshire Council granted the club a lease on a vacant school site, a fundraising campaign replaced the school with a purpose-built theatre, and the building opened in 1963.
The Little Theatre is still there. The Rhyl Children's Theatre Club still runs. Productions still happen, still performed by local people for local audiences, still in a building that exists because the community raised the money to build it. In a town with a complicated relationship with its own civic identity, that is not nothing.
The Miniature Railway
The Rhyl Miniature Railway has circled the Marine Lake since 1911. That makes it one of the oldest miniature railways in the world still in continuous operation — it has been running, on and off, for over a century. The current locomotives are steam and diesel; the track runs for just under a mile around the lake perimeter.
Most visitors walk past it or dismiss it as a children's ride. It is a children's ride, but it is also a piece of living transport history that has survived two world wars, the decline of the British seaside resort, and the demolition of almost everything around it. The fact that it is still there, still running, still selling tickets, is its own kind of achievement.
Foryd Harbour
The western end of Rhyl is where the town's character changes. The Foryd Harbour area — the mouth of the Clwyd, the Pont y Ddraig bridge, the bird reserve on the estuary — is quiet, genuinely beautiful on the right day, and almost entirely missed by visitors who stay on the main promenade. The birdwatching is serious: the Foryd estuary is a significant site for waders and wildfowl, particularly in autumn and winter. The walk from the Foryd Harbour to the beach at the river mouth and back along the dune fringe is one of the best short walks in the area. More about Foryd Harbour.
The Rhyl History Club
Not a place but a resource: the Rhyl History Club maintains one of the most thorough local history blogs of any town of Rhyl's size in Britain. The WordPress archive at rhylhistoryclub.wordpress.com covers everything from the town's Victorian development to the nightclub scene of the 1980s, the Sun Centre in its pomp, the pier in its various incarnations, and the social history of the seafront trades. If you want to understand what Rhyl actually was, and why it became what it is, this is where you go.
The Promenade at the Edges
The central promenade — the stretch between SC2 and the Pavilion — is the Rhyl that gets photographed and written about. The edges are different. West towards Foryd the promenade thins out and the sea views open up properly; east towards Prestatyn the built environment gives way to dunes and the beach widens. At either end, particularly early in the morning before the arcades open, the North Wales coast looks exactly like it did when Turner painted it: flat water, long light, and the mountains of Snowdonia as a backdrop on a clear day. That view is free and it is genuinely extraordinary. Almost no one seeks it out.