The museum's most affecting exhibit is not inside the modern building at all. Highgate Cottage stands a few steps away on the village street -- the small terraced house where Lloyd George grew up after his father's death left the family almost destitute. They lived there only through the generosity of Elizabeth Lloyd George's brother Richard Lloyd, a shoemaker and Disciples of Christ clergyman, who took in his widowed sister and her children and supported them on the earnings of his cobbler's bench. Richard's mother lived with them too: three generations in a workman's cottage. The interior has been restored to look as it did in the late nineteenth century when the future Prime Minister did his homework by the fire. The boy who would one day rewrite the British social contract grew up here, watching his uncle stitch leather for the farmers of Eifionydd.

Clough Williams-Ellis was already famous when the trustees approached him about a building. His Italianate village at Portmeirion, across Cardigan Bay, was attracting visitors from around the world. But Williams-Ellis was a Welshman from the next valley over, and the chance to commemorate Lloyd George at Llanystumdwy mattered to him. He designed an art-deco pavilion in 1960, plain by his fantastical standards but carefully proportioned for the village street. In 1990 it was extended and refurbished, and reopened by Lord Callaghan -- a Labour Prime Minister honouring a Liberal predecessor. The museum contains the audio-visual theatre, a Victorian schoolroom set up as the parish school where Lloyd George had all of his formal education, and case after case of personal effects. It is also, perhaps fittingly for a politician who married twice, licensed to conduct weddings.

Among the objects on display is a coin called Lloyd George's Crown. The name is misleading -- it is not really a coin at all but a token marking the first old-age pension paid in Wales under the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, which Lloyd George shepherded through Parliament as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Until that act, an elderly person without family or savings could expect the workhouse. Lloyd George's pension was five shillings a week, paid through the Post Office, no questions asked beyond age and citizenship. The token is the size of a five-shilling crown and represents the first payment made in the country where Lloyd George himself grew up close to poverty. Beside it sit objects from the other end of his career: papers from Versailles, gifts from foreign governments, the trappings of a man who had ended up at the centre of the post-war world.

Few political careers can be traced so completely in one place. The school where he was educated stands a few hundred yards away, still teaching children. The chapel where the family worshipped, Capel Moriah, was rebuilt by Williams-Ellis. The Dwyfor where Lloyd George played as a boy runs through the wooded grounds where he is buried, his grave marked by a glacial boulder he chose himself. The museum threads through all of it. Gwynedd Council runs the place now, opening it through the summer months and by appointment in winter. The exhibits tell the story of the People's Budget of 1909, the National Insurance Act, the war coalition Lloyd George led from 1916 to 1922, his role at the Paris Peace Conference. But the building's small scale insists on the more important thing: a politician whose policies redrew British life was born in a cottage smaller than most modern garages, half a mile from where he asked to be buried.