Wales has been a revelation to me. My only previous experience of the place was in the autumn and winter of 1970-71, when I went to university in Cardiff for two terms. My memories are of a wet, cold, grey city, with street after street of poorly kept row houses, and bone-chilling damp.
The main activity for most of the students (me often included) was spending time (and bursaries) in the students’ union pub. At least it was warm and convivial there, and it was definitely a lot more fun than studying in a musty room or draughty library.
This time we avoided Cardiff, especially since back in New Zealand when I searched on Google Earth for the house where I once lived, it and the street it’s on looked virtually the same as 40 years ago.
We instead drove along the Welsh-English border, working our way up the Wye Valley. If the omens weren’t good, we could always make a quick dash back into the comfortable villages and hedgerows of England.
Back in my student days I had never ventured very far out of Cardiff, and had certainly never driven through the countryside. So the rural areas, I’m happy to report, were an eye-opener.
And I knew things had really changed when we stopped at a Welsh roadhouse, or café (pronounced here as ‘k-ay-ff’, with a long ‘a’). Along with the normal full breakfasts of eggs, bacon, sausage and baked beans, the owners of the Honey Café were offering Cajun-seared salmon, TexMex enchiladas and burritos for dinner.
It was certainly a far cry from my student fare at the cafeteria in Cardiff, which consisted mostly of soggy chips, less-than-warm meat pies, and mushy canned peas that looked both years old, and unnaturally new, since they were dyed with a green food colouring that made them almost iridescent.
ooOOoo
After lunch, we got out the map and had a reconnoitre. Maybe we’d give Wales a bit more of a go, after all. So we headed off into wild northern Wales, towards Snowdonia National Park, with the tallest mountain (or big hill, really) in Britain.
Our destination was Portmeirion, a small village on the north Wales coast that had been built by a supposed eccentric named Clough Williams-Ellis. Portmeirion is also known to many BBC television viewers as the backdrop for The Prisoner, a cult series from the ‘60s starring Patrick McGoohan about a secret agent imprisoned in a village, and the authorities’ attempts to make him lose his mind.
I don’t know about the madness, but it really is an unusual place. Because what Williams-Ellis attempted with Portmeirion was, as he put it, an “outrageous experiment” – to create a group of buildings, of various architectural styles, that were both sympathetic to the site and to each other.
He had always been interested mostly in how buildings fit together, and while he did have an architectural practice in London (he famously set up shop after only three months training in 1903), he still had to borrow £5000 from the bank in 1925 to buy the Portmeirion site.
Everyone (and especially his wife) thought he would go bankrupt immediately, but his enterprise was successful, right from the time he rebuilt the original building that he found on the site, a tumble-down house on a beach that was locally known in Welsh as “Frozen River Mouth”.
The hotel that arose from the rebuild attracted guests, and family money as well as profits from the hotel helped finance further buildings. As the experiment grew, people donated things (not just pots and statues, but whole buildings).
Williams-Ellis’s wonderful skill was in making it all (the façades, the roof lines, the stairs, the colours of the walls) fit together in a seamless whole.
The final result might best be described as a “village that is also a monument” – a mosaic of extraordinarily beautiful houses created over 50 years, all from the mind of one remarkable man.
Portmeirion isn’t some heavy, theoretical treatise that architects often attempt. It has more of a “light openness” that Williams-Ellis hoped might catch the modernists (the ones who at the time were designing public buildings as grey boxes) somewhat unawares, so that, as he put it, “A few fanciful ideas might seep into their minds”.
But as it turns out his vision was just a little ahead of its time. The grey boxes, especially the public ones like office buildings and multi-storey housing, are everywhere in the world these days being torn down, while “post-modernism”, and the use of bright colours and dramatic angles, has finally come to the fore.
Portmeirion isn’t any one architectural style. It makes you think, “That’s Italian”, and then, “That’s Moroccan”, and then, “I’m sure I’ve seen that somewhere in the German Alps.” It’s an “Esperanto” (that concocted world language) of architecture.
And since Williams-Ellis was a magpie, it also incorporates pieces of old mansions, Georgian porticoes, and even the use of interior pieces like stone fireplaces, only put on an exterior facing!
As Williams-Ellis put it, Portmeirion is an “architectural explosion”, and some of the houses are just façades, without interiors, since there just wasn’t enough room to do full buildings because of the cliffs.
But the magic thing that makes it totally different from the pastiche developments you see now-a-days that try to be fanciful or “Mediterranean”, is that it wasn’t built all at once. It instead grew over time, like real villages do, “With one building leading to another,” as he put it, “and a new thing needing to fit in with all the others.”
What catches your eye as soon as you enter the arched entry, and holds it firmly as long as you stay, is the use of colour. Everywhere there are amazing pastels of almost every imaginable hue, all used as lime washes the way you see white-washed buildings in a place like Greece.
A wall might be bright yellow, but with an archway that’s painted underneath in cobalt blue. There might be a lime-green house right next to an orange one, but the whole thing just works somehow.
It all seems so “right now”, really, and it wouldn’t be out of place in the pages of the latest contemporary design magazine. So what’s astounding is that Williams-Ellis created Portmeirion through the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the drab, rationed years in Britain that followed. To think, even further, that he did it in a very undeveloped location on the north coast of Wales simply beggars belief.
Much of architecture, at least in the past, was built to the glory of God, and later (and not necessarily separate from the former) as an expression of power. This place, on the other hand, was just one man’s expression of his joy, not for a single architecture, but for all architectures. And from all accounts he was more surprised than anyone that other people found a similar joy in what he achieved.
Not forgetting the gardens, Williams-Ellis also set them out wonderfully, and like everything else about Portmeirion, they are really well looked after, with precious few weeds. Pride of place in front of a wonderful Georgian-style house at the top of the hill (painted the colour of raspberry gelato!) is a double-flowering manuka from New Zealand, which on the day we visited was in magnificent full bloom.
Portmeirion isn’t just the buildings and the colours, as evocative as they are; it’s how they manage to almost magically combine. And mostly, as the waiter in one of the cafés said, it’s about the way you’re caught by a new, amazing view almost every time you turn your head.
All I know is I would pay handsomely to be a gardener here, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t get much work done. Every time I lifted my head, my eyes would force me to take a very long “rest”!
ooOOoo
Another wonderful thing about Wales (the north part at least), is that the Welsh language is obviously so strong. We heard it everywhere, and in one Tescos foodstore in a place called Porthmadog I’m sure there were more people speaking Welsh to each other than English.
A further indication was the graffiti. You must have a pretty vital language for kids to be tagging derelict buildings and toilet stalls in Welsh!
And, of course, everywhere there are now bi-lingual road signs, with Welsh often listed above or in bigger letters than English.
It wasn’t always that way. I well remember during my time in Cardiff going down to the city centre once to watch a daily ritual. At night someone in the Welsh nationalist movement would put up a large Welsh language sign covering a prominent road marker at the big roundabout fronting the government offices. And every morning, to the jeers of on-lookers, an official would walk out onto the roadway and take the sign down.
We really enjoyed trying to read all the road signs, and attempting to pronounce the place names. But as you can imagine, success was highly unlikely thanks to the strings of “y’s” and “f’s”, as well as what looked suspiciously like a national shortage of vowels.
My wife jokes that a group of frustrated optometrists is responsible for the way the Welsh language is spelled. To see what she means, here are a few Welsh place names that you might not be able to pronounce, but you can at least use as an eye test:
GLYNDYFRDWY
BLAENPLWYF
YNYSDDU
YSBYTY
YSLN
CWM
~originally composed in June, 2011~