Or’eira, Llanfacherth, Dolgellau, 9th May 2006
Portmeirion: a curious place. Clough Williams-Ellis designed and started building it in 1925, supposedly ‘to demonstrate how a naturally beautiful site could be developed without spoiling it.’ Accordingly, it is charming, harmonious and of a scale fitting for its setting. It is also twee, artificial and a pastiche that has nothing to do with the Welsh vernacular. An exercise in conservative nostalgia, it is contemporary with Le Corbusier’s commission to design a house that was to be the modernist masterpiece Villa Savoye. It tells us nothing about how to build villages, much less has it had any relevance to meeting housing needs over the past 100 years. A fantasy, a folly, it has now assumed its rightful place as a tourist attraction, an escape – and a rather tacky one at that. As a picturesque, undulating assemblage of buildings and spaces it’s a magnet for photographers, full of colour and contrived views – maybe that it’s real role, a photo set. A disturbing air of unreality pervades this retreat from the world and progress (and retrogression too, of course). Filming The Prisoner here in the 1960s was an inspired choice: it represents a fundamental criticism of the village’s purpose, an interpretation that was probably lost completely on the then 84-year-old Williams-Ellis.