The Final Folly
When utopia was a British holiday resort
Last week, thanks to my girlfriend’s holiday planning skills, I discovered a cultural landmark buried in the countryside of northern Wales. The village of Portmeirion is a monument to one man’s remarkable eccentricity, the architect and conservationist Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis, or Clough as he was known.
Once described by The Times as “the last folly of the Western World,” Portmeirion’s assemblage of pastel-coloured buildings and random ornaments, throwing together Gothic pavilions, Rococo arches and neoclassical cupolas, inspired a generation of designers frustrated with the limitations of Modernism. It was also a setting treasured by artists and writers from Noel Coward and Ingrid Bergman to the Beatles and Jools Holland.
Yet it’s not obvious today what these people found so magical about Portmeirion. The village now has the feel of a decommissioned theme park, where tourists wander around unsure of what exactly they have paid £17 to do.
This is a cruel fate, especially since Clough himself is one of the most fascinating figures I’ve had the pleasure of researching. But how did this place, once considered an almost surreal landscape of architectural fancy, lose its strangeness and charm? The answer contains a bitter irony. Since his death in the 1970s, Clough’s playful approach to design has become almost commonplace, but in a way that he would have hated.
Born into an Anglo-Welsh landowning family in the 1880s, Clough moved through a world of aristocratic high culture that now seems like a fairytale. He only studied architecture for a few months before dropping out and, after a brief apprenticeship, setting up his own practice. His first big commission came when he bumped into a client on the train after a hunt ball. Having signed up to fight in 1914 and ended the war with a military cross, he made a career building and restoring country houses for the upper class, including various grandees of the Conservative and Liberal parties.
But Clough was also part of the London smart-set, thanks to his marriage to Amabel Strachey, daughter of Spectator editor John Strachey and cousin of the famed biographer Lytton Strachey. Amabel was herself a prolific writer and anthologist, as well as a fierce socialist, and exerted a strong influence on Clough. In 1924 the couple collaborated on a book, The pleasures of architecture, where they argued for the necessity of beauty to a civilised society.
The following year, Clough bought a parcel of land overlooking the River Dwyryd estuary in Snowdonia, renaming it Portmeirion. At the time there was just one house on the site, where the late tenant had, according to Alwyn Turner, “allowed the property to become overgrown and neglected to such an extent that a path had to be cut through to allow her body to be removed for burial.” But Clough quickly began erecting his own quirky structures, and continued doing so until his own death fifty years later, aged ninety-four.
Portmeirion is most commonly described as an “Italianate village,” though this obscures more than it reveals. The atmosphere is certainly Mediterranean, thanks to a lot of brightly painted plasterwork, and Clough did initially conceive the project as a hotel and cottage complex for upper-class holiday makers, who would have been familiar with la dolce vita. (Incidentally, this puts Portmeirion in competition with Thorpeness, Suffolk, for the title of Britain’s first purpose-built holiday resort). But really the Italian theme serves to bind together something much more eclectic and bizarre.
Essentially, Clough constructed a kind of smorgasbord of pastiche, piecing together a variety of styles so that, somehow, they seem to complement each other. There are arts and crafts country houses, cottages in Kentish vernacular, a smattering of Gothic, plenty of Georgian, neoclassical and baroque, as well as a pseudo-Jacobean town hall. All of this centres on a plaza resembling a giant chessboard, which more than one observer has compared to a gnome village.
In part, this eclecticism stems from Clough’s recycling activities. Many of Portmeirion’s structures began as architectural remnants salvaged from around the country, including a sixty-foot colonnade from Bristol and timbers from the Royal Navy’s last active wooden warship, HMS Arethusa. But really the village owes its character to Clough’s spirit of theatrical experimentation. He felt, for instance, a bell-tower was needed because “it was imperative that I should open my performance with a dramatic gesture of some sort.” He erected a Palladian temple-like structure after deciding there was a “dome deficiency” in the village.
And this is without mentioning Portmeirion’s countless playful details and architectural pranks. The village is packed with fake windows, perspective tricks, statues, obelisks, balconies and gazebos.
In other words, Clough designed a Xanadu for the high society to which he and Amabel belonged, a whimsical and picturesque retreat in one of the most beautiful corners of the country. And it was very fashionable. Regular visitors over the decades included the philosopher Bertrand Russel and Beatles manager Brian Epstein. In the 1960s, Portmeirion found mass appeal after it became a setting for cult TV series The Prisoner. Royalty made an occasional appearance too. When the future Edward VIII visited in the 1930s, Clough ensured privacy by simply increasing the public admission price to ten shillings.
But Clough was not just an eccentric gentleman, and nor was Portmeirion simply a pleasure park. He belonged to that tradition, so influential in Britain from the mid-19th century until the mid-20th, of the patrician socialist. To summarise, Clough suspected the whole project of modernity may have been a terrible mistake, but he believed the only appropriate response was an imaginative and energetic effort to tame its destructive aspects, and to preserve the best elements of the past within it. Or as his own motto had it, “Cherish the Past, Adorn the Present, Construct for the Future.”
Many of Clough's views seem strange and irreconcilable today. He was a member of the Labour Party, an initial admirer of the Soviet Union (where he was offered a job as Stalin’s chief town planner), and advocated for the nationalisation of all land. At the same time, he hated the minimalist, utilitarian logic of Modernism, believed the government should subsidise landowning families to keep running their estates, and longed to recreate the ordered towns and rural communities of the Georgian period.
Above all, Clough fought for the principle that “every human being has a natural need for beauty,” and against the intrusions of free-market capitalism into the countryside. His campaigning began in earnest in the 1920s, when he helped set up rural preservation societies, and published a fiery polemic against urban sprawl, England and the octopus, which today reads like a prophetic environmental tract (“For every year of doing now there will be a generation of undoing and expiation, and many of the evil things will remain with us forever”). After 1945, he was closely involved in the Attlee government’s program for town and country planning, and personally kick-started the establishment of Britain’s National Parks by buying 300 acres of Snowdonia countryside and donating it to the public.
Portmeirion was very much part of Clough’s moral vision. He hoped it would provide a model for rural development, showing how human settlements can exist in ordered harmony with nature, and proving to the tourism industry that “good architectural manners were also good business.” He also designed the village as a rebuke to the “unfeeling” character of modern architecture, intending his buildings to provide aesthetic education and pleasure, as well as a tangible link to the past.
Ultimately though, Portmeirion’s legacy would be shaped by developments beyond Clough’s control. In the 1970s, a backlash against Modernist architecture got underway, spearheaded by a group including Robert Venturi and Paolo Portoghesi. Like Clough, they argued that the purpose of architecture was to communicate and stimulate, rather than just to serve a function. They also shared Clough’s taste for stylistic quotation and his playful embrace of ornament (“less is a bore,” said Venturi famously). And so, by the 1980s, Portmeirion had become a rare example of actually-existing Postmodernism.
It’s true that you can find a family resemblance between Clough’s impish creations and certain Postmodern buildings, like James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, a rambling neoclassical parody with all sorts of confusing, colourful and humorous elements. But as it turned out, Postmodernism was just a stepping-stone towards a further set of spaces that use such theatrical techniques to entertain consumers, from Disney Land to themed restaurants and casinos, Mediterranean villas alongside golf courses, and seaside towns made artificially charming and quaint for tourists.
More than anything, it is these commercial forms of pastiche that Portmeirion resembles now, many of them embodying the market-driven property development Clough despised. Without realising it, he designed the ur-theme park, creating a model that has retroactively robbed Portmeirion of the peculiar beauty it once had.
Then again, the other obvious descendent of Clough today is Britain’s new king, Charles III, who has developed the traditionalist village of Poundbury on the Duchy of Cornwall lands. Like Portmeirion, Poundbury is meant to suggest an alternative model of development, one that is (at least in theory) limited in scale, socially conscious and environmentally friendly, while drawing its aesthetic inspiration overwhelmingly from the past. It does seem quite unlikely that Charles will ever get to role out Clough’s ideas at a national scale, but I suppose we live in strange times.