Welsh Journals

A Note on Architecture By IORWERTH C. PEATE I AM glad of the Editor's invitation to comment on Mr. Clough Williams-Ellis's article, if only to declare my complete agreement with most of his statements. Mr. Williams-Ellis tends perhaps to overlook the distinctive Keltic elements in our architecture: not all the outside stimuli came by way of England." There are directions in which our architecture is more closely akin to that of Ireland and Scotland. (And Mr. Williams-Ellis seems to have been unfortunate in his experiences of Welsh cooking he has still, it seems, to taste the real delights of the pot-oven and the griddle, and the many confections which are peculiarly Welsh.) But the Keltic links were all in a distant past and Mr. Williams-Ellis is indeed just in his picture of our recent history. It is, as he states, almost true to say that there are no Welsh architects at all it is also true that there is a lamentable widespread lack of aesthetic appreciation of good architecture in Wales. The two facts are closely related. Some months ago, in a South Wales industrial town, I stood before a late 19th-century chapel. As an example of all that is positively bawdy and unrestrainedly vulgar, the building cannot be surpassed: it deserves every denigratory epithet you can give it. My companion, a distinguished Welsh writer, thought it wonderful that our countrymen should have succeeded in setting up such a magnificent building. Yet he would have stormed at the sins so evident in that architectural monstrosity-its vulgarity and lack of restraint, in particular -if he found them in the fabric of modern Welsh prose or poetry. This insensitiveness to architectural bad taste amongst Welsh men and women of real culture is, at first sight, amazing. So many at them (there are exceptions, of course) seem to be in love with meretricious suburbanalities and to be addicted to shiny pressed brick-and yet have an exquisite taste in literature. In the pictorial arts and in music the same blunting of the senses is discernible, which may be the reason why the banalities of Dr. Joseph Parry and Dr. Caradog Roberts have been so popular amongst us. I have expressed some of my views on this subject in The Welsh House (pages 3-6). A cityless, moorland community incorporated for the last four hundred years in another virile state, Wales has had