For much of his long and productive life, Clough Williams-Ellis was known as the second-rate architect who designed the bizarre Welsh holiday village of Portmeirion. Jonah Jones's 1996 biography of him may have perpetuated this view, its title including the phrase The Architect of Portmeirion. Williams-Ellis himself seemed, somewhat modestly, to endorse that diminished assessment by calling his (first) autobiography Architect Errant (1971), a decision that was consistent with a career spent ‘enduring considerable scorn from his fellow professionals’. In contrast to such characterisations, this chapter champions Clough Williams-Ellis as an important figure in modern and modernist architecture. It claims that his achievements can best be conceived through his articulation of rural modernity and that any study of rural modernisation is incomplete without consideration of Williams-Ellis's work.

In line with the late twentieth-century influence of postmodernism and the development of the heritage industry, both Portmeirion and Clough Williams-Ellis began to rise in stature and reputation. In 1996, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) even republished Williams-Ellis's book England and the Octopus (1928) to celebrate their seventieth anniversary. As David Matless notes in Landscape and Englishness, Williams-Ellis was one of the key English rural preservationists of the interwar period, especially in his role with the CPRE in its influential early years. Matless argues that the preservationist movement of the CPRE aimed to ‘plan a landscape simultaneously modern and traditional’. Particularly notable was the CPRE's attack on the government for failing to curb the laissez-faire of uncontrolled development. The organisation maintained that planning should be guided by a modernist doctrine of ‘fitness for purpose’, even though this might suggest a preference for tradition above modernity. In his study of this period, Matless understandably concentrates discussion about Williams-Ellis on landscape matters. Yet he does not fully recognise that Williams-Ellis was a busy architect and prolific writer on diverse topics throughout his long life. This chapter will argue that, although landscape was important to him, Williams-Ellis regarded himself primarily as an architect, and that it was the totality of his various interests (which include what he regarded as his ‘sidelines’) that set him apart from other architects and preservationists.