MEDITERRANEAN CAPRICE IN SNOWDONIA: THE STORY OF PORTMEIRION

In this episode, Clive and John discuss the holiday village of Portmeirion, an improbable, festive vision of the Mediterranean built on a wooded peninsula of Snowdonia, whose centenary falls this year.

Portmeirion was the creation of the architect and card-carrying Welshman Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who died at the age of 94 in 1978.  Clough, as everyone called him, was a conspicuous figure. Wearing an attention-seeking combo of tweed breeches and long yellow socks, he took a prominent role in the debates that raged over conservation, town-planning and the countryside. With a natural flair for publicity, he felt himself to be fully justified in playing the man of taste in a philistine world.

A holiday stage set, Portmeirion included several old buildings which would otherwise had been
destroyed, and offered, with its piazza and campanile and apricot paint, a distillation of Mediterranean experience to an audience that had hardly been out of this country.

But there was another side to Clough, whom his friend Christopher Hussey 
regarded as ‘a spontaneous Welshman with incredible energy and an intuitive love of the thick, rough stone of his country.’ To encounter this side of his being, it is necessary
to visit his nearby home of Plâs Brondanw, a few miles further inland.