The History of Portmeirion Village: A Dream Realised
Updated: Aug 29
Portmeirion shouldn't really work. It's a Welsh headland dressed up as an Italian riviera town, built in fits and starts over fifty years by one architect who never stopped tinkering with it. And yet it's produced one of the most successful stage comedies in British theatre history, given a cult television show its entire setting, and quietly built a pottery empire that's still selling today. The postcard version of Portmeirion's story usually stops at Clough Williams-Ellis and his vision. The fuller version involves a mistranslated Welsh place name, a war hero son who never came home, and an architect who left instructions that his creation could never be sold.
Quick Answers
Who built Portmeirion? Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who bought the site in 1925 and worked on it until 1976.
What was there before? A neglected estate called Aber Iâ, with a mansion built around 1850 and gardens planted by earlier owners.
Why is it famous? It was the filming location for the cult 1960s TV series The Prisoner, and Noël Coward wrote Blithe Spirit there in six days.
Can Portmeirion be bought? No. Williams-Ellis placed it in a charitable trust before his death, and it's now legally protected from ever being sold.
Who owns it today? A charity called the Clough Williams-Ellis Foundation, run day to day by his grandson Robin Llywelyn.
“Thus, for more than a generation the Portmeirion Idea simmered or boiled within me waiting its chance to be born, which required (besides me and my dream) capital, the appropriate site and a vivifying principle, a use, a job, that would make and keep it viable.”
A 'Frozen Mouth' by the Sea
Long before Clough Williams-Ellis arrived, the site was known as Aber Iâ, a name he took to mean Frozen Mouth, though it more likely just described the icy estuary at the mouth of the river. Its last private occupant was Adelaide Haigh, a wealthy widow with a habit locals still talk about: she would stand behind a screen to read the Bible aloud to her fifteen dogs. Her son, the botanist and ornithologist George Henry Caton Haigh, spent decades building up the rhododendron collection and subtropical planting that still fills the village's woodland gardens today. By the time Williams-Ellis bought the estate after Adelaide's death, the family's grand landscaping ambitions had run well ahead of their means, and he described what he found as a wilderness abandoned by romantics who'd been carried away by their own grandiose planting schemes.
Williams-Ellis had been hunting for the right site for years before he heard that Aber Iâ was for sale. The land belonged to his own uncle, Sir Osmond Williams, which made the purchase, in 1925, more of a family transaction than a lucky discovery. He bought the neighbouring ruin of Castell Deudraeth separately in 1931, rescuing it from a proposal to turn it into an institution for what were then callously termed delinquent youths of low intelligence. Once he had both properties, he renamed the whole estate Portmeirion: Port for its coastal position, and Meirion after Merioneth, the historic county it sat in.
The Architect Behind the Dream
Clough Williams-Ellis was born in Northamptonshire in 1883, the son of a clergyman, and trained as an architect for barely three months before setting up his own practice in London. His family claimed descent from Owain Gwynedd, a medieval Prince of North Wales, and that inherited sense of Welsh identity shaped his lifelong campaigning for rural conservation as much as it shaped Portmeirion itself. He served with the Welsh Guards and later the Royal Tank Corps during the First World War and was awarded the Military Cross, then married the writer Amabel Strachey in 1915, a cousin of the Bloomsbury Group figure Lytton Strachey. Their daughter Susan was born, fittingly for a family steeped in artistic circles, in the Guildford home of the painter and critic Roger Fry.
The family paid a heavy price for the war that shaped the young Clough. Their only son, Christopher, was killed in action as a Welsh Guards ensign in 1944, fighting near Monte Cassino in Italy, the same country whose coastal architecture had inspired his father's life's work. Williams-Ellis rarely spoke publicly about the loss, but continued building Portmeirion for another three decades afterward.
Built in Two Phases: 'Curly' and 'Straight'
Construction ran from 1925 to 1939 in what Williams-Ellis and his wife privately nicknamed the Early Curly phase, producing essential structures like the Watch-house, the Campanile and the Chantry in a playful mix of Mediterranean, Baroque and Palladian styles. The Second World War halted building work entirely, though the village still found a use, serving as a quiet retreat for RAF airmen, including Guy Gibson, who led the Dambusters raid, before he returned to operational duty.
Building resumed in 1954 and continued until 1976 in what the couple called the Late Straight phase, a more classically restrained style than the earlier work. Throughout both phases, Williams-Ellis had a habit of rescuing architectural fragments from buildings being demolished elsewhere and giving them a second life at Portmeirion, describing his creation as a home for fallen buildings. His most significant rescue was the barrel-vaulted ceiling of Emral Hall in Flintshire, bought for around £13 and rebuilt into what's now Portmeirion's Town Hall, alongside salvaged oak cornices and mullioned windows, and a pair of cannons from Fort Belan that still guard The Battery today.
A Village Built from Other People's Leftovers
Some of Portmeirion's most photographed features have origins with nothing to do with Wales at all. The Bristol Colonnade began life around 1760 as the entrance to a cold bathhouse at Arno's Court near Bristol. It was badly damaged during the Second World War and left derelict, shrapnel scars still visible in the stonework, before Williams-Ellis rescued and rebuilt it in the village's Central Piazza in 1959. The nearby Gothic Pavilion was salvaged from Nerquis Hall in Flintshire, while a set of columns lifted from Hooton Hall in Cheshire spent thirty two years buried in the woods before Williams-Ellis finally found a use for them.
Even the smaller details tell the same story. The lower section of the Campanile bell tower was built using stone taken from the ruins of the genuine 12th century castle that once stood on the estate, recorded by the chronicler Gerald of Wales in 1188 and demolished in the mid-19th century. The crown-shaped ornament on the Town Hall was fashioned from an old water boiler, an example of what Williams-Ellis liked to call giving something a good Cloughing up. And in one of the odder touches, the camera obscura fitted into the tower of the White Horses building uses a lens and control mechanism taken from a decommissioned U-boat. Even the Central Piazza itself, now the village's heart, started out as nothing grander than a disused tennis court until Susan Williams-Ellis pushed her father to redevelop it properly in the 1960s.
Six Days That Produced Blithe Spirit
In 1941, playwright Noël Coward arrived at Portmeirion for a short break with the actress Joyce Carey after his London flat had been destroyed in the Blitz. Carey had hoped to use the trip to write a play of her own; it never materialised. Coward's did. Working from eight in the morning until seven at night, he wrote the entire first draft of Blithe Spirit in six days, changing barely two lines before it opened in the West End later that year. It went on to run for 1,997 consecutive performances, a record for a non-musical play in London that stood for years. Coward later called it an almost psychic gift, and joked that a wedge under one wobbling table leg was the only thing that slowed him down.
From Danger Man to The Prisoner
Portmeirion's connection to television actually predates its most famous role by several years. In 1960, the spy series Danger Man filmed an episode there because it was cheaper than shooting the Italian location the script called for. Its star, Patrick McGoohan, never forgot the place, and when he came to create his own show a few years later, he built its entire concept around it. The Prisoner, first broadcast in 1967, cast Portmeirion as The Village, the surreal, unnamed settlement where McGoohan's character, Number Six, is held captive after resigning from a sensitive government job. Filming took place over four weeks in September 1966, with a short return visit the following March, and the production deliberately hid the real location, crediting most episodes only as filmed on location rather than naming Portmeirion outright.
The Prisoner has never really left. An official fan club, Six of One, was founded in the 1970s and Portmeirion still hosts an annual convention for the show's devotees. In 1976, the BBC returned to film part of the Doctor Who serial The Masque of Mandragora there, using the village to stand in for Renaissance Italy. For the show's fiftieth anniversary in 2017, the trust that runs Portmeirion unveiled a bronze bust of McGoohan near the village entrance and installed a permanent giant chessboard on one of the lawns, so fans could recreate the show's most famous scene for themselves.
The Beatles at Portmeirion
Portmeirion also has a real, if more understated, connection to British pop's biggest act. Beatles manager Brian Epstein was a regular visitor through the 1960s, and producer George Martin came to stay with him in 1966. George Harrison first visited in 1967, at the height of the band's psychedelic period, and reportedly found the village's dreamlike atmosphere genuinely influential on his songwriting. In 1993, Harrison booked accommodation there to celebrate his 50th birthday with friends, and his signature survives on a hotel document from that stay. Paul McCartney has also visited the village over the years, and rumour has it Epstein once considered staging a full Beatles event at Portmeirion, though the idea never came to anything. For the fuller story of how the band's public image was built one carefully staged day at a time, our piece on Don McCullin's mad day out with the Beatles is worth a read.
A Pattern Nobody Thought Would Sell
Clough's daughter Susan Williams-Ellis did as much as anyone to keep Portmeirion solvent in the second half of the twentieth century. Trained at Chelsea School of Art under Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, she began selling her own pottery designs in the village gift shop in the 1950s, then bought two struggling Stoke-on-Trent potteries with her husband Euan Cooper-Willis in 1960 and 1961 to manufacture them properly. Her breakthrough came in 1972, after she stumbled across a set of antique botanical illustration books and used them as the basis for a new range called Botanic Garden, mixing dozens of different floral patterns within a single tableware collection rather than keeping every piece matching.
Department store buyers told her at the time that nobody would stock a range with that many different designs, and that nobody would want to buy crockery that didn't match. Botanic Garden went on to become one of the best-selling tableware ranges in the world, and it's still in production at the same Stoke-on-Trent factory today, more than fifty years later.
A Village That Can Never Be Sold
Portmeirion's reputation among architects grew steadily through Clough's lifetime, and in 1956 it drew a visitor few would expect on a remote Welsh headland: Frank Lloyd Wright. The American architect was in Wales to collect an honorary doctorate from Bangor University, tracing his own mother's Welsh ancestry, and Williams-Ellis personally showed him around the village during what turned out to be Wright's only visit to the country of his forebears.
Williams-Ellis died in 1978, two years after finally completing his life's work, having already taken steps to make sure it would outlive him intact. He had established a charitable trust, now known as the Clough Williams-Ellis Foundation, to hold Portmeirion in perpetuity. As a result the village cannot legally be bought or sold, every building carries listed status, and the whole site is a designated conservation area. Today it's run day to day as Portmeirion Ltd, with Clough's own grandson, the novelist Robin Llywelyn, as managing director, keeping the estate in family hands without it ever being able to change ownership outright.
Portmeirion Today
A century after Williams-Ellis first bought the estate, Portmeirion still welcomes around 225,000 visitors a year, drawn by the same combination of eccentric architecture and genuine natural beauty he set out to prove could coexist. It's become one of Wales's most popular wedding venues, with couples marrying in the Town Hall built from Emral Hall's rescued ceiling, and it remains busy well outside the summer season, with discounted winter tickets bringing in local visitors and an annual food and craft fair drawing crowds year round.
Clough Williams-Ellis spent his life arguing that architecture could be playful without being frivolous, and that a beautiful landscape could be built on rather than simply preserved behind glass. A century on, with the buildings he rescued still standing and the trust he set up still keeping the whole place out of any single owner's hands, Portmeirion remains the argument he was trying to make, built in stone, stucco and salvaged doorways on a Welsh headland he once called a wilderness.
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