In The News - Most Unusual Village In Britain

Constructed in the 1920s on the sandy Dwyryd estuary of North Wales, beneath Snowdonia’s majestic peaks, Portmeirion’s buildings run the stylistic gamut: Jacobean and Gothic, Norwegian and Regency. They are pink and red, green and ochre. Each roofline differs from the next Eclectic, eccentric Portmeirion is one of the most recognizable attractions in Wales. The lifelong project of an architect with a passion for beauty, it would have been easy for the village to be frozen in time, a relic its 1930s heyday. Instead, it has continued to change and evolve. If there’s anything constant about Portmeirion – other than its beauty – it is its capacity for reinvention.

In 1968 it was featured in the bizarre British secret agent television series The Prisoner. People began to fall in love with Portmeirion that day. Britain was still going through a self-imposed period of post-war ugliness; it seemed terribly important that there was someone in the country who still believed in beauty.

That someone was a Welshman called Clough Williams-Ellis, who was born in 1883. He was a successful but virtually self-taught architect – and he despaired of the 20th Century’s attachment to Functionalism and Brutalism. He wanted to show, as he once wrote, “that buildings properly situated within a landscape could actually enhance the scenery.” In 1925, Williams-Ellis bought a small estate on the edge of Snowdonia and started proving his point, building on pretty, wooded slopes that ran down to the estuary.

There was already a gentleman’s residence on the estate, which he immediately turned into a hotel. Williams-Ellis always intended that his village – which he called Portmeirion, a fanciful name coined from Merionethshire, one of the 13 historic counties of Wales – would be a tourist destination.

There were a few other buildings, too, mainly stables and outbuildings, which Williams-Ellis embellished in a colorful manner that owed more to style than necessity. “Cloughed up” became a fashionable term for his technique. He painted shutters on the facade of one cottage, attached a statue of St Peter to another. His approach was just as irreverent as his style: he would draw his concept, then let his builders work out how to achieve it.

But most of the village was new – in the sense that new uses were found for old, salvaged pieces of architecture. In the years after World War I and World War II, modernizing architects were demolishing a lot of Britain’s architectural heritage. Williams-Ellis acquired these buildings, or their parts, to reuse – so much so that he declared Portmeirion “a home for fallen buildings”. His pseudo-Town Hall, for example, used a carved Jacobean ceiling that the architect purchased from a Flintshire stately home awaiting demolition – and also recycled an upturned pig boiler to create a copper-painted coronet on its spire.

Portmeirion plays impishly with perspective, too. If you visit the Unicorn, a pink Palladian “cottage,” you will be surprised to find that it takes far fewer steps than you’d expected to get from the road outside to the front door: the Neoclassical façade tacked onto the building makes it look much larger from far away than it really is.

Williams-Ellis and his writer wife Amabel hoped that their village would inspire painters. But artists never arrived – perhaps, ironically, because Portmeirion was already a work of art. Still, thanks to Amabel’s contacts with the London literati, many celebrities were soon accepting invitations, including the playwright George Bernard Shaw, novelist H G Wells, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and director Noel Coward. When Edward, Prince of Wale came to visit in 1943, Williams-Ellis added a private ensuite to one of the hotel rooms and temporarily increased the village’s entrance fee to £1 to keep down day tripper numbers. By World War II, Portmeirion had become a visual and social phenomenon, so much so that Williams-Ellis bought a hotel in the Shropshire market town of Shrewsbury to act as a halfway house for those driving up from London.

If you're in Wales, this newsworthy village is worth a peak.

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