The Village

Portmeirion haunts the imagination. Its bizarre appearance in The Prisoner makes it seem a landscape of madness, both surreal and incarcerating, like a dungeon covered in icing sugar. So while in North Wales I had to go and look round.

I found it, in fact, immensely funny. It's entirely fake, but completely delightful, with nothing like the nightmarish note it had in that paranoid TV series. It's full of architectural jokes, conceits, like the grand Palladian villa (a pink one!) which actually hides a bungalow behind it, little bits and pieces salvaged from all sorts of buildings, plonked in a completely different context, and then, more often than not, gilded or painted turquoise. You could spend your whole day here taking photographs, and I'm sure some people did. No one view can do justice to the place, it's simply too varied.

Of course everyone knows rogue architect Clough Williams-Ellis, who constructed the place, wanted it to be 'delightful' and to make people smile, but I'm sure his playfulness went even further than most realise. Look about you in Portmeirion, and you see faces:


Or perhaps that's just me ...