The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner
crags’, replete with ‘an exuberant jungle of exotic and subtropical flowering shrubs (mainly rhododendrons)’. Portmeirion, as Williams-Ellis christened his fiefdom, owed nothing to prevailing notions of functional architecture; rather it was a Mediterranean extravaganza of campaniles, piazzas, an observatory tower which incorporated a camera obscura, Regency-type colonnades, colour-washed baroque houses, a vaguely Jacobean-style town hall, trompe l’oeils, pillars, obelisks, orbs, ponds, terraces, grilles and a range of architectural jokes and whimsies.
A hotel opened for visitors in 1926, and throughout the 1930s Williams-Ellis extended Portmeirion with fifteen more buildings, many incorporating architectural salvage that he had acquired over the years. In that decade (and indeed during the Second World War too) the resort served as a retreat for celebrities such as Noël Coward (who would write Blithe Spirit during a week’s stay in 1941), George Bernard Shaw, Augustus John (who liked to speak Romany with a gypsy who lived in a tent in the woods until he was killed by a motorcyclist leaving the car park), Bertrand Russell (who wrote Freedom and Organisation, 1814—1914 at Portmeirion in 1934) and the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII), who also spent time there in 1934, and required that a bath and lavatory be installed in his bedroom, since it was not appropriate for a royal to share such facilities. Williams-Ellis even acquired a hotel, renaming it the Mytton and Mermaid, near Shrewsbury, so that those travelling from London and the South-East could break their journey for a night. Visitors could come for the day, too, and paid on a sliding scale: the more people there were, the higher the entrance fee. Usually the entrance fee was around one shilling, but it rose to a dizzying ten shillings (around £25 in today’s money) when the Prince of Wales was in residence.
Williams-Ellis admitted that while he had ‘an acute inborn instinct for architecture’, he remained ‘in some respects half-baked as a technician’, and many saw him less as an architect and more as a stage designer. Few if any of his exuberant excesses would have been possible had he followed his own precepts, as set out in a letter to the Manchester Guardian while he was on leave from France during the First World War: ‘Anyone who cares for England must be interested in national planning, the provision of a comprehensive co-ordinated and compulsory development and conservation scheme for the country as a whole, urban and rural, public and private.’ In fact the building of Portmeirion was only possible because there were then ‘no Building Regulations, no Town & Country Planning Act, no regulations about Historic Buildings’. Although Williams-Ellis thought there ought to be all these things (and said so repeatedly), ‘privately, secretly, he relished their absence’, wrote his wife. So effective was Williams-Ellis at ‘calling my own tune’ that when Snowdonia was declared a national park just after the Second World War, something he had long agitated for, its boundaries were drawn to exclude Portmeirion.
No planning permission was needed, or sought, for another ‘world-class folly’ that opened to the public for the first time in the summer of 1929. Roland Callingham, a London accountant, owned a large house and garden in the leafy commuter suburb of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. Callingham was a model-railway enthusiast, and commissioned the largest outdoor Gauge 1 railway layout in England for his garden, dragooning his gardener and other household servants, family and friends into making scale models of houses, shops, a castle, pubs, a cinema, a station and a church to set alongside his railway line, constructing roads and streets to connect them, and fashioning Lilliputian-sized people to inhabit his construction. Named ‘Beckonscot’ (an amalgam of Beaconsfield and Ascot, where Callingham’s railway collaborator lived), the first model village in the world covered a site of around two acres. It was visited by Princess Elizabeth on the eve of her eighth birthday in April 1934 with her grandmother Queen Mary, wife of the by then ailing King George V. The serious-looking, cloche-hatted, white-gloved child, third in line to the throne, peered through shop windows at the miniature goods for sale, watched 1:12-scale trains leaving from Maryloo (an amalgam of Marylebone and Waterloo) station, listened to the ‘choir’ singing in one of the several churches (they would later include a model of one built in Beaconsfield as a memorial to G.K. Chesterton, who died in 1936), and took it upon herself to rearrange the sheep in the fields.
By May 1937, when the American magazine National Geographic featured Beckonscot, the miniature country town was attracting over 57,000 visitors a year, and boasted a racecourse (Epwood — combining Epsom and Goodwood) a fairground, docks and an Art Deco aerodrome which looked remarkably similar to a miniaturised Croydon airfield.
The intention was that Beckonscot should grow and develop just like any other town, so as the decades passed, modern concrete slabs were erected in place of some of the pargeted buildings, elaborate ironwork at the railway station was replaced by concrete and glass, and the original steam trains gave way to diesel. But in 1992 it was decided that the ‘progress’ of the past sixty years should be reversed, and Beckonscot returned to how it had been when Princess Elizabeth (who by then had been on the throne for nearly forty years) had visited. 1960s-style blocks of flats were torn down, concrete offices destroyed, glass and metal bus shelters uprooted, all to be replaced by workshops and mock-Tudor cottages, while individual shops, many modelled on actual Beaconsfield establishments of the 1930s, replaced a supermarket and all the buildings were repainted in ‘the drab colours relevant to the time’. The children’s author Enid Blyton, creator of Noddy and Big Ears, had moved to Beaconsfield in 1938, and a replica of her house, Green Hedges, was recreated as part of a village that now stands in a perfect 1930s time-warp, viewed through binoculars the wrong way round, with its tea-drinking matrons sitting under shady umbrellas, its edge-of-town roadhouse next to the tiled swimming pool with its two-foot diving tower with five springboards, its eternally grazing cows, sheep and horses and more exotic animals in the zoo, its pink-coated huntsmen permanently in full Tally ho!, its polo field, its miller perpetually carrying sacks of grain into the windmill, watched by two archetypal figures from the 1930s countryside, hikers in shorts with rucksacks on their backs and carrying stout sticks.
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