Beyond Portmeirion: The Architecture, Planning and Protests of Clough Williams-Ellis

For much of his long and productive life, Clough Williams-Ellis was known as the second-rate architect who designed the bizarre Welsh holiday village of Portmeirion. Jonah Jones’s 1996 biography of him may have perpetuated this view, its title including the phrase The Architect of Portmeirion. Williams-Ellis himself seemed, somewhat modestly, to endorse that diminished assessment by calling his (first) autobiography Architect Errant (1971), a decision that was consistent with a career spent ‘enduring considerable scorn from his fellow professionals’.¹ In contrast to such characterisations, this chapter champions Clough Williams-Ellis as an important figure in modern and modernist architecture.