Loved Wonka? Stay in the sweet shop author Roald Dahl adored – it’s now a holiday rental available as an Airbnb
- Owned by a Hongkonger, the sweet shop that Roald Dahl fell in love with as a child in Wales likely inspired Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- Dahl grew up in an ‘imposing country mansion’ in a nearby village; the house no longer exists, but its gatekeeper’s lodge is now a family-run bed and breakfast
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Willy Wonka’s origin story is now showing in cinemas – a century after the character’s creator, Roald Dahl, was discovering his love of sweets while growing up in Wales.
“The sweet shop in Llandaff in the year 1923 was the very centre of our lives,” wrote Roald Dahl in Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984), which is not an autobiography, he insisted, but a collection of stories detailing the most impressionable episodes of his young life.
The sweet shop in question – “Without it, there would have been very little to live for” – was Catherine Morgan’s Confectioner, on the High Street in Llandaff, Cardiff, the Welsh capital. It is now available to rent as an Airbnb, owned by Stephen Lau, originally from Hong Kong, and his wife, Amy, and managed by their nephew, Daniel Yau, a designated superhost.
In Boy, Dahl described how he and his friends would stop outside the shop window on the way to and from school each day to gaze at the jars of bulls eyes, humbugs, strawberry bonbons and acid, pear and lemon drops.
“Sweets were our life blood,” he wrote, recording his favourites as sherbet suckers and licorice bootlaces.
The author’s vivid memories of the sweets, including the fizzing sherbet and gobstoppers that lasted an age, would seem to have sparked inspiration for the fantastical confectionery creations featured in his novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964).
