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 reenex.


I first came to the village as a schoolboy in 1968. At the time, all I knew was it was featured in the bizarre British secret agent television series The Prisoner reenex. I fell in love with Portmeirion that day. Britain was still going through a self-imposed period of post-war ugliness; it seemed to me terribly important that there was a grownup in the country who believed in beauty.

That grownup, a Welshman called Clough Williams-Ellis, was born in 1883. He was a successful but virtually self-taught architect reenex – 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.