When Barbara Jones published Follies and Grottoes in 1953, she made no mention of the coastal village that architect Clough Williams-Ellis had been creating at Portmeirion since 1925. Reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, Laurence Whistler thought this was a ‘curious’ omission as he believed the whole conception could be described as folly.

Clough, as he was always known, had bought a hillside site on the Welsh coast and extended an existing house as a hotel. On the slope down to the sea he developed a village of houses and pavilions in a variety of architectural styles. Some of the buildings were rescued from houses facing the wrecker’s ball and Clough himself described the place as a ‘home for fallen buildings’.

Laurence Whistler’s description of the site in 1953 perfectly catches the atmosphere of the village:

‘In gaiety of colour, in exuberance of design, in its complete indifference to the surrounding slate-grey Puritan world of the mountains (and in the frivolity of some of the materials employed) Port Meirion is a folly on a generous scale, expressive of the cultured Briton’s perennial craving for Mediterranean warmth.’

Jones took note, and Portmeirion featured in the 1974 2nd edition where it was described succinctly as ‘a complex of hotel buildings and ornamental conceits, new and re-erected, most beautifully arranged around a small bay’. She was particularly interested in the Bristol Colonnade, a structure added to Portmeirion in 1959, but which she had written about in its previous incarnation.

The Bristol Colonnade started life in the middle of the 18th century as a garden building housing a cold bath. It stood in the grounds of Arno’s Court at Brislington near Bristol, the seat of William Reeve, an iron smelter.

Reeve’s estate featured a number of other fanciful buildings including a triumphal arch and battlemented stables known as the ‘Black Castle’, but as Barbara Jones scrawled in her research notes, the ‘Bath House’ was ‘Mr Rs most charming whim’.

By the 1830s the ‘gardens and cold baths’ were being operated by a Mr Clark as a ‘delightful retreat for the Gentry and Public in general’. In 1912 the antique dealers Little & Barber took over the Black Castle as a showroom for their wares. Visitors could explore the surrounding lawns and gardens where a ‘special feature’ was the classical building with bath.

The elegant building contained a central chamber with sunken bath, and a fine plaster work cornice and ceiling. In August 1939 Lord Derwent, Chairman of the Georgian Group of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (the group would later become a charity in its own right: the Georgian Group) wrote to The Times asking that ‘this unique building be scheduled’. Sadly, world events got in the way and the bath was damaged by bombs during the Second World War.

Jones described it in the 1954 edition of Follies & Grottoes as ‘delicate and pretty’ with plasterwork that was a ‘wreathing of waves and masks, shells and dolphins’. She concluded it was all of the ‘greatest elegance’ and regretted that by then the  building was only of interest to the local vandals.

The photographs in her files show that the plasterwork was already badly damaged when she was researching for her book, and by the time it was published she had to describe the decoration in the past tense ‘for a later visitor reports that now the plaster is down.’

A 1954 article on the follies at Arno’s Castle (prompted by the publication of Jones’s Follies and Grottoes) warned that the building needed ‘attending to very soon’ or it would be lost. But, despite protests from the Council for the Preservation of Ancient Bristol, the local council decided to demolish the scheduled ancient monument to allow a road-widening scheme.

Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978) came to the rescue. After negotiation with the building’s then owner, the Bristol Tramway and Carriage Company, the Ministry of Works agreed that the facade of the bath house could be moved to Portmeirion to join what the writer Jan Morris called the ‘merry architectural jumble’.

In 1957 Clough commissioned ‘devoted’ Bristol architects Burrough and Hannan to produce a plan and elevation of the ‘Arno’s Bath House’, with each stone carefully numbered. The exterior masonry was taken down stone-by-stone by a builder who specialised in church restorations and taken to Wales. Clough chose a site in the heart of his village for his new acquisition, and then stood back and admired the work of his Master Mason, William Davies, as he turned the ‘intimidating stone heaps’ into what became known as the Bristol Colonnade. The building was complete in October 1958 when the Bristol Evening Post sent a photographer to capture the ‘really magnificent’ colonnade. It was officially opened in 1959, and was listed at Grade II* in 1971.

As Portmeirion grew to its ‘intended size and shape’ with Clough’s ‘imagined picture being gradually filled in and realised’, the guidebooks were constantly updated. They were just as colourful and charming as the village itself.

The Bristol Colonnade was only a little over a decade old when it appeared in two television broadcasts. Bird’s Eye View: the Englishman’s Home was first shown in April 1969 and was filmed entirely from a helicopter. The commentary, in verse and prose, was by John Betjeman who asks ‘What fair Mediterranean port is this, stumbling to the sea?’

Producer Edward Mirzoeff had so much material from filming the Portmeirion section that he created a ‘little spin-off using the trims and out-takes’. This was shown on BBC2 in June 1969 with a commentary by Clough himself. The good news is that both are available to watch today, as is a later tribute by musician and folly-fan Jools Holland.

For Bird’s Eye View: the Englishman’s Home see https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p013ypx0/birds-eye-view-the-englishmans-home

And for Bird’s Eye View: Portmeirion visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUufnXCSrVQ

And equally enchanting is Jools Holland’s 2002 film with boogie-woogie soundtrack https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p03lwzhl/afoot-again-in-the-past-portmeirion

Thank you for reading and do please share any thoughts in the comments box at the foot of the page.

In the late 18th century industry was booming in the area around Swansea in Wales. Ever more sophisticated machines were powering the various works, and coal was required to fuel the industry. With copper works and coal mines, John Morris was a wealthy man and lived in style at the newly-built Clasemont , a grand classical mansion. The unusual structure he had constructed to house some of his workers was also eye-catching, but within decades it was dismissed as a folly.

John Morris (1745-1819) was a partner in Lockwood, Morris & Co., the biggest of the copper smelting enterprises in the area, and the rapid expansion of the works meant further housing was needed for his workforce. On the hill called Cnap Lwyd he built a vast fortress-like structure, with four corner towers and a central courtyard, which quickly became known as Morris Castle. It provided homes for a number of families (accounts vary between 20 and 40), and was one of the earliest examples of a tenement for estate workers. Probably designed by architect John Johnson, who also designed Clasemont (or Clas Mont or Glasmount), the castle had decorative quoins and battlements made of copper slag, a by-product of the smelting process. The waste could be moulded into blocks, their darker tone and soft sheen contrasting nicely with the local building stone.

But whilst handsome, Morris Castle was not practical. A passer-by in 1776, only a few years after it was completed, found there was already dissent: ‘Mr Morris has built a very large house on a high hill which makes a striking appearance for the Workmen to dwell in, but they complain of clambering up to it’. By 1796 the grand hillside fort was shown to tourists as ‘Morris’s Folly’: the development had been an experiment that failed. Would the workpeople ‘go the summit of a high hill and live in “flats” … when there was plenty of space for pretty little white-washed cottages?’, queried a later writer, before concluding: ‘They would not!’.

Morris learned from his mistakes, and when he created a new town for his workers in the late 1770s, the buildings were conventional cottages and on lower ground. This planned settlement, named Morris Town or Morriston, thrived, and in 1819 the ‘houses for the poorer classes’, neatly arranged in straight lines, were considered ‘excellent and commodious’: by that date Morris Castle did not even merit a mention.

The mock castle did however continue to fulfil its role as a dramatic eye-catcher from Morris’s nearby demesne, making a ‘striking appearance’ on the hilltop. The landscape around Clasemont combined manicured elegance with the thrill and curiosity of heavy industry, which some early visitors found ‘wild and romantick’. This view was clearly not shared by Morris’s son, Sir John Morris 2nd bart (his father had been created a baronet in 1806), who after his father’s death in 1819 demolished Clasemont and built a new mansion a few miles away at Sketty, where he could escape the noise and dirt of industry. Clasemount’s site was later developed, and today the principal building on the former estate has a postcode that will be familiar to many: SA99 1BN, home of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority.

Morris Castle was offered for sale or to rent in March 1811, but there is no record if there was any interest. The building was still inhabited (presumably by those who had no other option) when Rev. Walter Davies wrote his General View of the Agriculture & Domestic Economy of South Wales in 1814. He praised Sir John as ‘the most extensive individual builder of comfortable habitations for the labouring classes’ and described the tenement as a ‘kind of castellated lofty mansion’. At that date it was largely home to colliers, but there was also a tailor and a shoemaker as ‘useful appendages’ to the family of residents. By the middle of the 19th century the building had become redundant, supposedly undermined by coal workings, and by the time the 1st edition Ordnance Survey map was published in 1877 it was described as ‘in ruins’.

The land on which Morris Castle was built was the property of the Duke of Beaufort, and when Morris’s lease expired it reverted to the estate. The building continued to deteriorate and in 1990 there was a further collapse. The surviving fragments were scheduled by Cadw and Swansea City Council bought the site from the Beaufort Estate. Hopefully this dramatic Swansea landmark can be saved from further decline.

Not enough of Morris Castle survives to illustrate the use of furnace waste as a decorative building material, but across the river Severn in the Bristol suburbs stands Arnos Castle (aka Arno’s Castle, or the Black Castle), where the material is used on a much greater scale. Built for William Reeve in 1764, the slag blocks were produced at his copper and brass works. The unique structure, which a visitor in 1777 described as looking like a ‘Fairy’s Castle’, housed his stables and was restored in the 1990s; it is now home to the Black Castle pub.

Thanks to The Garden Historian for discovering the important contemporary reference to the building as ‘Morris’s Folly’.

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