Clough Williams-Ellis

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For a complete list of works, see List of works by Clough Williams-Ellis.

Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis (May 28, 1883 - April 9, 1978) was an English born Welsh based architect of Welsh extraction, known chiefly as creator of the Italianate village of Portmeirion in North Wales.

[edit] Career

Clough Williams-Ellis was born in Gayton, Northamptonshire, England, but his family moved back to his father's native Wales when he was four. He married the writer Amabel Strachey in 1915.

Village Hall, Stone. Clough Williams-Ellis, 1910

Though he read for the natural sciences tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, he never graduated. After a few months at the Architectural Association in London in 1903/4 (which he located by looking up "Architecture" in the London telephone directory) he worked for an architect for a few short months before setting up his own practice in London. In 1908, he inherited a small country house, Plas Brondanw in Merionethshire, from his father, restoring and embellishing it over the rest of his life, and rebuilding it after a fire in 1951. He served with distinction in World War I, and began work on Portmeirion during the 1920s. A fashionable architect in the inter-war years, Clough's other works include buildings at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, and groups of cottages at Cornwell in Oxfordshire; Tattenhall, Cheshire, and Cushendun, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. He is also known for his design (in the 1930s) of the former summit building on Snowdon, which - after unsympathetic alteration in the 1960s and a long-term lack of maintenance - was described by Prince Charles as "the highest slum in Wales".

Clough also served on several government committees concerned with design and conservation and was instrumental in setting up the British National Parks after 1945. He wrote and broadcast extensively on architecture, design and the preservation of the rural landscape. He was knighted in 1971 for "services to architecture and the environment".

Clough's elder daughter, Susan Williams-Ellis, used the name Portmeirion Pottery for the company she created with her husband in 1961.