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Clough Williams-Ellis — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Architectural career

After the war, Williams-Ellis helped John St Loe Strachey (later his father-in-law) revive pisé construction in Britain, building an apple storehouse followed by Harrowhill Copse bungalow at Newlands Corner using shuttering and rammed earth. The building was featured in a book he wrote on the subject of earth construction.

One of his earliest designs of 1905 was for a pair of Welsh labourers' cottages in a vernacular style with end gable chimneys which imitate the 16th-century Snowdonia Houses In 1909 he designed a house in an advanced Arts and Crafts style for Cyril Joynson at Brecfa in Breconshire In 1913–1914 he was responsible for the rebuilding of Llangoed Hall in Breconshire, one of the last country houses to be built before the First World War. While it is a mixture of a number of historic styles, it also has modern features with elements such as the chimneys derived from the work of Lutyens. Other work in Wales by Clough Williams-Ellis includes the Festiniog Memorial Hospital of 1922, Pentrefelin Village Hall, and the Conway Fall Cafe.

In 1925, Williams-Ellis acquired the land in North Wales that would become the Italianate village of Portmeirion (made famous in the 1960s as the location of the cult TV series The Prisoner, and the 1976 Doctor Who story The Masque of Mandragora). Portmeirion is notable not only as an architectural composition, but also because Clough Williams-Ellis was able to preserve fragments from other now demolished buildings from Wales and Cheshire. These include the plaster ceiling from Emral Hall

In 1928, Williams-Ellis wrote his book England and the Octopus (published in 1928); its outcry at the urbanization of the countryside and loss of village cohesion inspired a group of young women to form Ferguson's Gang. They took up Williams-Ellis's call for action and from 1927 to 1946 were active in rescuing important, but lesser-known, rural properties from being demolished. Shalford Mill in Surrey, Newtown Old Town Hall on the Isle of Wight and Priory Cottages in Oxfordshire were all successfully saved due to the Gang's fundraising efforts. The Gang endowed these properties and significant tracts of the Cornish coastline to the care of the National Trust. The Gang's mastermind Peggy Pollard (known within the Gang by her pseudonym Bill Stickers) and Williams-Ellis became lifelong friends.

In 1929 Williams-Ellis bought portrait painter George Romney's house in Hampstead.

By the 1930s, Williams-Ellis had become a fashionable British architect; he was commissioned to create numerous works throughout the UK. These include buildings at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, cottages in Cornwell, Oxfordshire, Tattenhall in Cheshire, and Cushendun, County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

Williams-Ellis served on several government committees concerned with design and conservation and was instrumental in setting up the British national parks after 1945. The following year he was appointed inaugural chairman of the Stevenage Development Corporation by Lewis Silkin. He wrote and broadcast extensively on architecture, design and the preservation of the rural landscape. He was a member of the Knickerbocker Club.

At Aberdaron he designed the Old Post Office in a vernacular style in 1950. While an important later commission was the redesign and rebuilding of Nantclwyd Hall in Denbighshire. However he was equally capable in working in the Modernist idiom of the interwar years; as well demonstrated by the restored Caffi Moranedd at Cricieth and the former Snowdon Summit Station of 1934. After a reduction in window sizes (they kept blowing in) and further alterations in the 1960s and the 1980s, this summit building was in a poor state and was eventually demolished in 2007. Prince Charles once described it as "the highest slum in Wales".

In 1958 Williams-Ellis was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) "for public services". He was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Years Honours List of 1972 "for services to the preservation of the environment and to architecture". At the time, he was the oldest person ever to be knighted.