Clough Williams-Ellis

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For a complete list of works, see [[Clough Williams-Ellis: Works]]

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

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.

Though he read for the mathematics 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.

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.

List of works

Compiled by Gareth Hughes, based on the preliminary list of drawings held in the RIBA Drawings Collection

For a complete list of works, see [[Clough Williams-Ellis: Works]]

This is as complete list as can be achieved although some works have gone unrecorded because of the loss of most of Clough Williams-Ellis' office papers in a fire in 1951. In addition, a number of drawings in the collection are not from Clough's office and may represent schemes on which he was asked to comment, rather than design projects by Clough.

External links

[Portmerion piece on Clough Williams-Ellis]
[North Antrim website] with designs by Cough Williams-Ellis
[Official Portmeirion site]
[Plas Brondanw]

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