Portmeirion

Yes, I know I’m getting a bit carried away with making You Tube trailers for my books, but here’s another one:



This one features vintage photos of Portmeirion Village, about which I wrote an essay in a book I edited a couple of years back. The place looks a bit different now (it’s in colour, apart from anything else), but it’s still as magical as ever it was.

I hadn’t been to Portmeirion before I was invited to edit the book (invited by Mark Eastment, then of Antique Collectors Club and now of the V&A, who gets a bit miffed if he doesn’t get a mention). But it only takes an evening there to understand entirely why people fall in love with the village. There really is no other place like it.

Happily, I've been working with Portmeirion again over the last few months, together with my partner, on a new book – Magic Gardens: The Underwater Art of Susan Williams-Ellis.

Susan, of course, was the daughter of Clough Williams-Ellis, the man who built Portmeirion, and in her own right was the founder of Portmeirion Potteries. In that capacity, she helped shape the style of the 1960s and went on to create the Botanic Garden range of tableware.

She also had a lifelong infatuation with the world underwater and spent thirty years painting what she saw. Which is the subject of the forthcoming book.

And no doubt there’ll be a new video along when that one comes out as well.