SNOWDONIAN VISIONARY
On the wooded slopes of the River Dwryryd stands the wild Italianate village of Portmeirion. Julie Brominicks looks at the life of its maverick creator, Clough Williams-Ellis
The Italianate village of Portmeirion sits incongruously on the coast of north Wales. What led its architect to build this eccentric creation?
At dusk, light from the illuminated bell-tower spills on to wet cobbles, is absorbed into blue and rose walls and twinkles off small panes of glass. Waves lap the stone quay and white sand. Behind the turrets and domes, enveloping the rocky peninsula, a dark woodland conceals a labyrinth of tracks.
Portmeirion is an illusory place, full of magic, colour and light, its buildings intermingled with water, trees and rock, where you are easily lost – if not physically, in the woods or the piazza, then at least in your imagination.
The village was built between 1925 and 1975 by Clough Williams-Ellis. Although this exceptional architect designed hundreds of buildings around the country, Portmeirion remains his most famous work.
Williams-Ellis’s career and future happiness were assured in 1915 when he won both a competition run by newspaper proprietor John St Loe Strachey to design an affordable cottage, and also the heart of Strachey’s daughter Amabel, with whom he wrote books and enjoyed more than 60 years of marriage. That he became so prolific and popular an architect, having never completed his natural science degree at Cambridge and having trained for just three months before setting up his own practice, is testament to his zeal.
Clough was also an environmental campaigner. The First World War, in which he served as Commander of the Tank Corps, helped shape his convictions. “It may be well to
“He believed that the ‘multitudes without solitudes’ needed to be reunited with their natural heritage”
preserve England, but better to have an England worth preserving,” he wrote in
England and the Octopus (1928), one of many books in which he warned against polluting industrialisation, urban sprawl, adverts in the countryside or large-scale hydro-electric power.
“Why have to waste energy… fighting… against inconvenience, ugliness, dirt, over-crowding, noise, traffic delays, lack of sunlight, lack of open-air amenities, lack indeed of all or most basic things needed even for a merely tolerable existence, when by reasonable forethought and planning we could secure them all?” he wrote.
ENVIRONMENTAL ACHIEVER
“He was not just a campaigner, he was an achiever,” Clough’s biographer Richard Haslam tells me. Clough supported the National Trust and the Council for Protection of Rural England and co-founded the Council for the Protection of Rural Wales. “His wish to see what we now call conservation attitudes built into the planning processes was fulfilled,” says Richard. “But he wasn’t a stop-the-clock man. He was interested in the contemporary world and technologies – he just demanded appropriate siting.”
Clough countered his bold tirades with humour and kindness. Despite being ‘allergic’ to committees, his expertise won him places on many: New Towns, British Glass, and Highways to name but three. But his most notable contribution was to the creation of national parks – Snowdonia National Park in particular.
As he later wrote in Architect Errant (1971), Clough sympathised with those worried that the Parks would lead to “insensitive trampling and despoiling”. But he believed the risk was worth taking, for those “barbarously reared in far from splendid cities”. The “multitudes without solitudes”, as he called them, needed to be reunited with their natural heritage that they might appreciate and thus preserve it.
GROUNDED CHARACTER
He inherited the family estate of Plas Brondanw without disposable income, but fully aware of his privilege. Brondanw came with tenants and a culture of cap-doffing, in which his politics, which he described as “Labour, with flirtatious glances to the right and to the left”, could easily have been swamped. Yet his hard work and admiration for local people and their craftsmanship softened the class divide. John Marples lived in the village. “I remember when I was doing repairs to a cottage, he fetched me this huge barrel of creosote himself – nothing was too much of a problem for him,” he says.
Fond of adventure, Clough and Amabel took their children sailing. One stormy night on the St Tudwal’s Islands off North Wales’ Llyn Peninsula, they left the children safely asleep in the lighthouse and slept on board to save the yacht, which dragged its anchors and had to be coaxed to safety in Pwllheli. It was days before they could return to the children, who had been “interested to know what had happened, but not perturbed,” according to Clough. “Provisions had been sensibly rationed by them, ‘just in case’,” he wrote in Architect Errant.
One of those children, Christopher, was killed in the Second World War. “We never saw a picture of him,” Sian, one of Clough’s granddaughters tells me. Her sister Menna agrees. “There was a barricaded, empty bedroom. It was too
painful for them to talk about.” The couple’s resilience was further tested when their house, treasures, papers and the family dog were lost to a fire in 1951. But with characteristic industry and optimism, they pulled through.
A mountain range dissolves in rain then appears as a radiant backdrop to the garden created by William-Ellis at Brondanw, in which structural yew hedges lead the eye to theatrical views, and where Sian lived in the orangery for several years. “He was always in his library,” she told me. “I remember him smoking his pipe or standing at his desk designing. There’d be a log-fire, books all around. He told stories, and they were always new and often funny – he never repeated himself.”
“I was overwhelmed by how insightful he was,” Menna told me. “He had an unattainable level of education – he seemed to be in a higher realm. But he was always pleased to see us. He liked everyone. To him, people, the landscape and buildings were all part and parcel.”
PEOPLE, LAND AND STRUCTURE
Portmeirion, which Clough spent 50 years building, remains a perfect example of this trilogy and exemplifies his belief that a landscape needn’t be destroyed, and can even be enhanced, by development. The village was built in two stages: the site’s most distinctive buildings were erected from 1925 to 1939, with further detail added from 1954-76. Two World Wars, rationing and economic slumps meant Portmeirion was built on the cheap, with items salvaged from grand structures that
had fallen into decay or disrepair, hence Clough’s description of Portmeirion as “a home for fallen buildings”.
But salvaged materials contribute to its nuance and glee. Cobbles and bottles sit alongside granite anti-tank defences. The bell-tower’s walls hold stones from a 12th-century castle. One cupola is an overturned pig boiler. A substation masquerades as a bandstand; an external buttress was once a grand fireplace; and a Buddha from a film set smiles serenely in a grotto of rock. The village is an extravaganza of reclamation, reviving and celebrating pieces that might otherwise have fallen by the wayside.
Here, among the colourful domes and minarets, the charade and chiaroscuro, is the work of the boy who dreamt “If there was a shop … and I had a penny in my pocket, would it be too much to hope that its window would belly out in a fatly smiling bay with twinkling little panes?”
And here, with the trees or dark arches that entreat your eye to the light, or to a cherub, or to a ship, or a pinnacle, is the signature of a man who proved that both function and beauty, could indeed, co-exist.