Portmeirion was designed and laid out by the celebrated architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978) following his purchase of the estate, then called Aber Ia, in 1926. The village evolved over several decades and was still being added to in the 1970s.

The Town Hall, also known as Hercules Hall, is the largest building in the centre of the village and was built between 1937 and 1938. Being in a private village and so without a council, it serves for social events. Its generic form follows the Arts and Crafts village or college memorial halls that Williams-Ellis designed in the 1920s, but its fabric has an air of romance. It incorporates a large quantity of dressed and carved stonework from Emral Hall, Flintshire, the former seat of the illustrious Puleston family. Most significantly, the building houses the famous Hercules Hall which Clough Williams-Ellis bought at auction shortly before the house's demolition. The Hercules Hall is essentially the early seventeenth century Great Chamber from Emral which was reconstructed in its present form complete with its exceptionally fine vaulted plasterwork ceiling and later seventeenth century panelling. The relief plasterwork depicts the Labours of Hercules and the signs of the Zodiac and is enriched with bold strapwork. In its quality and complexity the Emral ceiling belongs to the finest examples of late Elizabethan and Jacobean plasterwork in Britain and can be favourably paralleled with the schemes at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire and Lanhydrock House, Cornwall. Externally, large transmullioned windows, heraldic cartouches and Tudor-arched doorways also belong to the former Emral Hall.

The Portmeirion Town Hall represents perhaps Williams-Ellis' most inspired and successful example of that class of re-use architecture he can be said to have made his own, and which can be seen as one of the predominent leit-motifs of Portmeirion village. In its porch a bronze portrait bust of Williams-Ellis at eighty years by Jonah Jones, 1963.

Source: Cadw listed building description.
Source: Haslam, Orbach and Voelcker, The Buildings of Wales: Gwynedd. Pevsner Architectural Guide (2009), page 693.

RCAHMW, OCtober 2009.