Dreamed up by the architect Clough Williams-Ellis in the 1920s, the Italianate village on the north Wales coast is still a delightful lesson in how to take frivolity in design seriously.
https://apollo-magazine.com/portmeirion-clough-williams-ellis-north-wales/
Gillian delivered her paper, Constructive Relationships or Obstructive Monopoly? The Darleys of Dublin, in June 2025 at Trinity College Dublin. More details here.
It will be included in a forthcoming open access publication from UCL Press, to be titled Enabling Architecture: Sourcing, selecting, and supplying stone, due 2026/27.
Gillian explores how we might think about heritage today and tomorrow, and in the light of past mistakes, in an essay taken from London of the Future – which asks what the capital will be like in 100 years’ time.
https://www.ribaj.com/culture/book-london-society-london-of-the-future-gillian-darley-heritage
‘The Essex Way’ was made in connection with Michael’s 2021 exhibition at Firstsite, ‘Welcome to Essex’. It saw him invite a number of Essex residents, thinkers, artists, writers, politicians and celebrity TV stars to walk with him along their favourite walk in Essex.
Watch highlights from Michael’s walks with Gillian, Maria Anastassiou, Ken Worpole and Elsa James.
I suffer from acrophobia, a simple fear of heights as opposed to vertigo, which I believe involves dizziness and a wish to throw yourself off a high place. But to find myself at parapet level on a roof for a morning is not my usual idea of a good time, especially remembering how the eagle that surmounts Dyrham, and beside which I now find myself standing, usually soars against the sky.
Dyrham at the moment is a virtual cathedral of scaffolding, balancing structural extravagance and absolute necessity. You reach it in a reassuringly solid-sided lift and step out, to walk its aisles on reassuringly firm ground, solid underfoot and suitably veiled to either side. Over the course of the year it has become an extraordinary, revealing, world apart – a domain visited by 70,000 already, thanks to a veritable army of volunteer guides.
On every side, as if in a theatre devoted to the varied and arcane skills of the 17th century building trade, are figures crouched down over gulleys, ridges or rooftops or striding around as nonchalantly as if their feet were on the ground. This many million pound programme for the National Trust, being carried out by Bristol builders Ken Biggs and their subcontractors, is urgently replacing a failing roof, found to largely consist of 19th century repairs, and which had begun to put the entire house below at risk. I asked site manager Andy Nicholls about a little coloured picture tacked onto a rafter below us. Ah, he answered, that’s just to remind the workforce of where they are – working above one of the most valuable interiors in Europe. The photograph showed a painted ceiling, potentially lost if any of them lost their step up here.
As my photographs show, the entire roof has become something like a great yard, a workshop in which lead workers are cutting, fitting, folding and inserting the new sheets alongside tilers who are preparing and laying both new and reused slates, buckets of copper nails to hand, while stone masons and conservators carry out work ranging from replacement of chimneys to the gentle cleaning of carved detail. Elsewhere the carpenters are putting the essential corsetry into the structure, without which all the other skilled work would be lost.
If you want to help, buy and inscribe a slate. Messages on broken or fragmentary slates are proving an inspired fund raising idea and the best possible tool for public engagement.
And high above, inscrutable, stands that immense eagle, hardly smaller than myself, surveying the transformational scene with a beady eye. In the meantime, Nicholls, a man with a passion for his job, is standing in.
Reading yet another excellent blog from Municipal Dreams a few days after the return to government of an administration that threatens to extend the Right to Buy to housing association stock, led me to muse on the housing conundrum.
When I first wrote for the professional journals, in the late 1970s, there were dozens of exemplary local authority housing schemes up and down the country. As a freelance who didn’t mind leaving London, I was kept busy. In unexpected corners you might find a local authority with ambitions (I particularly remember Allerdale) or a long established architectural practice (I remember Johnston and Wright in Alnwick) whose ambitions were to design high quality, well considered rural housing. I wrote about Harriston in Cumbria, a rebuilt mining village near Cockermouth, and about infill housing in villages all over that county, but I also wrote about thoughtful schemes in Milton Keynes and, soon, about that admirable project, Ralph Erskine’s Byker redevelopment in Newcastle upon Tyne including Tom Collins House, a sheltered housing scheme (see picture)– at the top of which lived a retired lighterman whose days were brightened by his view of the action on the Tyne far below.
By the time I was architectural correspondent for the Observer in the early 1990s, there seemed little to write about in that field. I scarcely ever touched on housing, except when pointing out the divergent architectural paths of Terry Farrell and Nick Grimshaw, whose partnership had been responsible for an elegant aluminium clad tower block near Hanover Gate, 125 Park Road – built for a housing association (see below) – as well as a tile-clad terrace for the LB of Camden, Millman Street in Holborn. By then both were nearly twenty years old. The Right to Buy was already biting into the supply of desirable local authority stock and there was little new to report.
Another twenty years on, there is hardly an example of new local authority built housing stock to be found. Municipal Dreams found one, with mixed tenure. Squabbles over the use of balconies seemed the only wrinkle. It left me wondering how things were in those modest schemes in the north west, and reassured by how fine the Byker development – all listed – still seems, when I last visited quite recently. I hate to see all this becoming history, out of sight and out of mind.
In 1955 young Ian Nairn took the incandescent fury of the ‘poles and wires’ campaign, begun by John Betjeman and the proprietor of the Architectural Press Hubert de Cronin Hastings (‘H d C’) and, adding a whole thesaurus of blights on the face of Britain, put it all into his own words. Laid out on the pages of the Architectural Review, blasted into life with the radical graphics and inimitable hand and eye of Gordon Cullen, the Outrage special issue woke up the nation. First came the AR readers, then those of the Daily Mail and its Fleet Street fellows, soon followed by the BBC audience and, incredibly, even the Duke of Edinburgh had used the word ‘subtopia’ – Nairn’s own word – in a speech. A movement to combat the national malaise, the mediocrity and mess of the built environment, was born.
Now the government promises a Select Committee on the Built Environment for the next term of parliament – whoever is in charge. For Nairn the outer edge of Southampton, the starting point for his illustrative journey, looked identical to the outer edge of Carlisle. He photographed both to make the point. Now the new housing in Banbury is the new housing in Chelmsford, while that around Southampton is no different to that around Carlisle. House builders, working exclusively for the private market, offer precisely what ‘the market’ wants, what people know is already available. It is an entirely circular process, in which supply and demand are identical.
So, time for someone fearless to rage against the second-rate, the imitative, the trite and to do so in words, images, graphics, on the page and online. To catch the eye and the ear and the imagination of the public. Committees of the self serving or even the well meaning will never manage to do it. This campaign needs to be ill mannered and foul mouthed, intense and melodramatic, even on occasion silly. But it must work. We have hit the nadir and the only way is up.
Descriptive language is a great persuader, as I wrote in my most recent ‘column’ (what do you call a piece of writing which has no presence on paper?) in Building Design. Elizabeth Hopkirk’s spirited defence of No 1, Poultry as a contender for the best building of the century at the 20th Century Society event held at the Royal Academy recently was a case in point. Neither she nor I, arguing for the deteriorating Shredded Wheat silos in Welwyn Garden City, achieved enough marbles (the means of voting) to make the final shortlist – which suitably enough opted for social and communal values over aesthetics and history – but her presentation galvanised the audience, many of whom I suspect might not have given the major Post-Modern building in the City (from 1997) more than a glance or even sneer until now.
But verbally spot-lit, Stirling’s late London building (Peter Palumbo’s replacement for the posthumous Mies van de Rohe tower proposed), immediately sprang into high relief. I am still taking my time to readjust to PoMo (a problem of my generation, blinded by its bland excesses, perhaps?) but my estimation of No.1 Poultry rose by leaps and bounds. In her defence of the building, Elizabeth Hopkirk pointed to the colourful interior windows around the central core court and suggested that they seem to invite washing lines strung between them. When she found herself sitting outside the Royal Exchange eating sandwiches in the sunshine, the stepped complexity of the building form as it cornered and rose above its site intrigued and pleased her. It all demonstrated to me how stale our (well, my) own viewpoint can become, and how essential is the nudge, or something more forcible, towards adjusting it, changing our approach, giving pause for thought and consideration of a different point of view. Language and figures of speech carried the argument.
Ian Nairn knew how to employ those. Fifty aficionados spent a late November Sunday on the same Routemaster (CUV 217C) that graces the cover of Nairn’s London (1966) looking at a slice of east London and the City through his eyes. Let me remind you of how he wrote (and his book is now back in print, in a facsimile edition from Penguin). At random, an offbeat analogy to conjure up an unusual City church (of St Mary Aldermary ‘Wren treated Gothic as if it were a cantankerous old aunt: with affectionate disrespect’), a joke to introduce some Gothic Revival almshouses (Holly Village, Highgate, ’an endearing group of hedgehogs’), gearing up to describe a Brutalist tower block (Eros House Catford where ‘rough concrete is put through all its paces’) or simple praise for a modernist block of flats (Highpoint 1 ‘can still provide, a little diminished, the thrill of the thirties’). It is that ability to compress a notion of the technical or the historical within a telling phrase that made Nairn, on the page or on film, the master – in print his words carefully weighed and measured, on television off the cuff and straight from the heart.
I have been writing about the youthful John Summerson recently (see AA Files 69, due any day now) and once again was overwhelmed by his elegance of language, his incisive mind and intellectual hinterland. Nairn confessed to going through Summerson’s Georgian London with a ‘toothcomb’ when writing his own masterpiece.
The challenge set by Nairn remains. Jonathan Meades has torn up the rulebook and recently brought Brutalism, by some obscure back lanes and diversions, to the portion of the nation that catches BBC4. Meades’ language is thoughtful, exultant and menacing by turn, and frequently his choice of analogy intriguingly opaque, but it all serves to burn the accompanying images into brain and retina. That’s what strong words can do for good buildings – make them better.
I just spent considerably less than 24 hours in Llandudno, a place that I had never visited. And am besotted. Just a neat, well kempt (I gather due to the good offices of the Mostyn estate?) entirely Victorian resort, wrapped round a slow bow of a bay marked to one end by a (mostly) green doorstop of land, to the other by the continuing curve, or an illusion of one, made by the pier.
As well as the natural embrace of the landscape, Llandudno has a modest taste for excess – ironwork porches, balconies and sometimes both combined that are as good as any I’ve seen.
And on top of this, it boasts a building that would not look out of place on Pall Mall, but this while being built as a gentleman’s club in the heyday of Wales’s largest seaside resort also doubled as a bank (which, in part, it remains) and a zany 1930s covered colonnade which winds up and away above the pier, towards a cable car, Happy Valley and much more. To be celebrated.
Here’s a version of my May piece for Building Design – which provoked some interesting comments. My book Factory, which came out in 2003, was a journey through the architecture of industry but BMW Leipzig was still to come.
After 1989, the haemorrhaging of employment in the former GDR, particularly in heavy industry, drew BMW’s attention east, and the Leipzig area was identified for the site of the company’s newest manufacturing centre on home soil. Production began nine years ago and currently employs around 6000.
In the city recently, with an afternoon to spare, I set out on the trail of the BMW works. They lie several kilometres out, slung low and grey amidst seemingly endless fields of vivid green and yellow, wheat and rapeseed. Wanting to see for myself a Zaha Hadid building larger than the Vitra fire station (the first ZHA building I visited) or the Serpentine café (the most recent) getting there without a car turned out to be quite a trek. It’s well out in the horizontal Saxony countryside, the local bus taking you via a small, untouched villages, one with a war memorial (a simple plinth with a helmet on it) on the central green. Then, all at once, you arrive.
It could hardly be less like VW at Wolfsburg where the works are the town. Here, out in the fields, amidst extensive car parking (but few BMWs), is a mesh of single storey, single process plants (press, body and paint shops, followed by assembly) all tied together by Zaha Hadid’s nodal Centre Block. Here the sweep and brio of the design reflects the ambition of the factory, which aims to clean up (in every sense) with a new generation of electric vehicles, BMW i3 and, next year the i8, while still continuing to manufacture conventional vehicles.
Hadid’s svelte reception area, through the turnstiles of which some of the workers were coming at the end of their shift, appearing from the furthest reaches of the immense site, is a metaphor for modernity, efficiency and clean industry. Overhead, bathed in blue sub-aqueous light, the silvered carcasses of BMWs roll quietly along on two levels, in opposite directions, a kind of Sorcerer’s Apprentice framed by the immensity of the structural concrete. In silent choreography the car shells rhythmically, and yet not entirely predictably, appear and disappear along unseen tracks. Add electronic soundtrack and it would be a fantastic performance piece. It is, self evidently, a very expensive front of house but how many other companies, even in electronics or other 21st century production facilities, can so succinctly offer an image of the processes occurring off stage?
BMW Welt, their spacey distribution centre in Munich was designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au and opened in 2007. Here in Leipzig, BMW describe ZHA’s Central Building as showing just how ‘different industrial architecture can look’. And that’s the point.
Even briefly glimpsed, (we missed the English language tour, two and a half hours of it) the endless revolving cars overhead are mesmerising. I doubt many of the teenage boys gathering for their tour will have seen Charlie Chaplin’s disturbing Modern Times – probably just as well. BMW has worked hard and with consummate skill to present and mediate modern industry within contemporary society. How many major companies, in the UK or elsewhere, would even dare to try?