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.
