One’s an architect’s idyll, the other a faded brutalist gem, but both are worth seeing on this scenic coastal hike between the two
It’s hard to think of two building projects less alike than Portmeirion, the whimsical Italianate holiday village that was the career-long labour of love of the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, and the theatre and student housing tower of Coleg Harlech, a rugged work of concrete brutalism. Yet they were completed within a few years of each other, 1975 and 1973, a few miles apart on the coast of north-west Wales. A good way to experience the poles of British 20th-century architecture is to walk from one to the other, and enjoy some ravishing landscapes on the way.
This is a land that runs to extremes of large and small, and harsh and sweet. There are mountains, rising towards their highest point at Snowdon, and extra-terrestrial terrains sculpted by slate quarries, but also little cottages and wooded lanes, and the narrow-gauge Ffestiniog railway, whose minus-sized steam engines chug endearingly over dizzying valleys.
