Right here is my newest characteristic for Telegraph Journey, a part of the Nice British seaside sequence.
I visited Portmeirion, staying within the village in a single day for a style of Clough’s architectural folly with out the crowds.
Learn on for high recommendations on tips on how to benefit from your go to, plus a heads up about plans for the upcoming one hundred and fiftieth anniversary.
Right here’s a taster of my article:
It’s referred to as ‘The Village’.
The pastel-coloured facades and magpie-like assortment of buildings offered the psychedelic backdrop to the Nineteen Sixties TV sequence, The Prisoner and supplied a haven for artists and musicians from the Jazz Age to the Sixties.
The writer Noel Coward wrote his comedian play Blithe Spirit right here in 1941 and The Beatles had been common guests after their supervisor took a lease on Gatehouse.
However, most of all, Portmeirion is the artistic imaginative and prescient of its founder, the architect Clough Williams-Ellis.
He purchased a plot of land on the Snowdonia coast in 1925 and devoted his life to his Italianate folly, working with nature to create one thing distinctive.
The “house for fallen buildings” was constructed in two phases till simply earlier than his demise in 1978, salvaging outdated buildings from demolition in an early tackle upcycling.
The village nonetheless chuckles together with his wry humour in its design.
Celebrations for Portmeirion’s centenary yr at the moment are in progress with plans for a Nineteen Twenties-style home celebration at Resort Portmeirion to commemorate the Easter 1926 opening and a sequence of open-air live shows to maintain alive Clough’s need for the village to deliver pleasure to others — because it did to him.
Right now, Portmeirion is a staple of North Wales daytrips however, regardless of the coach teams, Clough’s phrases, from his e-book, Portmeirion: The Place and its Which means, nonetheless maintain true:
“My primary goal, that of architectural and environmental propaganda, is not at all obscured.”
Learn the total characteristic through Telegraph Journey, Inside essentially the most weird seaside village in Britain.
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