Welsh legacy

Conwy in north Wales is among the most enchanting of our small towns. It’s like a toy fort, its encircling walls surviving intact until Thomas Telford had to breach them for his bridge. He did it elegantly, even delicately, creating a suspension bridge that actually enhanced the little town. It was for our brutal, automanic age to bulldoze through a road bridge in an act of architectural rape.

But that apart, the town is a gem. Within the encircling walls there is a medley of little twisting lanes that give the impression of being in a far larger town, for the visitor is never quite certain where the lanes are leading. One of these is Crown Lane. Rather steep. Very narrow. On the left-hand side as you go up it is a massive wall with a few windows — all evidently of great age but withdrawn, enigmatic. In the past, the town’s grandees, finding themselves living in proximity to the mob, were unwilling to run open house. Immediately adjoining this forbidding mansion is a crisply modern frontage, all plate-glass and woodwork, but somehow companionable.

The two buildings, separated by centuries, are closely related: the ancient building, the Elizabethan mansion called ‘Plas Mawr’, was the first seat of the Royal Cambrian Academy (the Academi Frenhinol Gymreig), and the crisply modern building — itself originally a chapel — is its new home.

On 12 November 1881, a group of Welsh artists met at the Llandudno Junction Hotel and drew up a proclamation, which pointed out the interesting fact that, while England, Scotland and Ireland all had their own artistic academies, Wales had none. And yet it was Wales, they claimed, that had given birth to the first artists’ colony.

In the 1840s and 1850s, a group of artists had gathered around David Cox at Betws-y-Coed.