Portmeirion is the fantasy village on a headland in north Wales, the dream of one man, architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis. It's construction, on his own land, went on for almost half a century of his long life. An ardent campaigner for environmental preservation (he founded both the Council for the Protection of Rural England and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales in the 1920's), he set out to demonstrate that structures could be colourful and still sit within their landscape. Of Welsh ancestry himself, Williams-Ellis's village on this rugged Welsh coast is usually labelled 'Italianate' and said to be modelled on Portofino in Italy. It is a charming anathema, a labyrinth of the complex and the unexpected.
In 1956 Frank Lloyd Wright visited Portmeirion, on the only trip he ever made to his ancestral homeland of Wales, and a film recorded the two architects wandering the village together. By all accounts Portmeirion gained Frank Lloyd Wright's approval.
In the 1960's Portmeirion became the setting for the cult series The Prisoner, a psycho-thriller about imprisonment within confines strange and beautiful. When I stayed in the village I discovered that you are fed episodes of The Prisoner on your TV. To watch them, then to venture out into the village, after a couple of days starts to give a strange sense of unreality.
I visited Portmeirion as a child, and have since harboured a fond memory of a strangely stylised, rather Italianate cat, passing the time of day by a small wall with a large pink spot painted on it. Returning as an adult I looked for the wall with the pink spot but never did find it. Perhaps I was imagining things......
I visited Portmeirion as a child, and have since harboured a fond memory of a strangely stylised, rather Italianate cat, passing the time of day by a small wall with a large pink spot painted on it. Returning as an adult I looked for the wall with the pink spot but never did find it. Perhaps I was imagining things......
Photos of Portmeirion 1 By Verity Cridland 2 and 3 By Scott Wylie
All from Flickr under CC BY license.
