David Lloyd George died in the library of Ty Newydd on the evening of 26 March 1945, with his second wife Frances beside him and the spring light coming off Cardigan Bay through the window the architect Clough Williams-Ellis had put in for him three years earlier. He was 82. The radical from Llanystumdwy who had become Prime Minister and led Britain through the First World War had come home to the Welsh village where he grew up. He is buried about a quarter of a mile away beside the River Dwyfor, in a grave Williams-Ellis also designed. Since 1990, the house where he died has been the National Writing Centre of Wales -- the place where Welsh literary culture, in both languages, sends people to learn how to write.
Ty Newydd means simply New House, which is funny because the bones of it are older than the Tudors. The Grade II* listed building was raised in the fifteenth century -- six bedrooms, two libraries, a large dining room. Behind a sober Welsh stone exterior, the interior carries surprising touches: a Chinese Chippendale balustrade, a panelled front door with fluted pilasters and a frieze, a vaulted library ceiling. When the centre was being prepared in 1990, builders working on the walls uncovered a medieval post-and-panel screen embedded in the structure. Conservators decided it was the most historically significant feature in the house. The screen had been hiding in plain sight, behind centuries of later work, since before the Reformation.
In 1942 Lloyd George and Frances bought Ty Newydd and hired Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, the eccentric Welsh architect best known for inventing the Italianate fantasy village of Portmeirion, to renovate it. Williams-Ellis added the library window that opens onto Cardigan Bay, fitted new front-window finials, and restyled the grounds, which slope south toward the sea on the edge of Llanystumdwy. The library extension was built of local stone rubble and whitewashed to match the rest. Lloyd George was eighty when the work started. He spent his last three years here -- a man who had once redrawn the map of Europe at Versailles, now walking the lanes of the village where his uncle, the village shoemaker, had raised him after his father died. After his death the grounds along the Dwyfor became the site of his monument, a circular enclosure designed by Williams-Ellis around a great boulder, with no name on it. The villagers know whose it is.
Robert Minhinnick, the Welsh poet who would later become editor of Poetry Wales, taught the first course at the converted centre alongside Gillian Clarke, the future National Poet of Wales. Both credit Sally Baker with the original idea -- a residential writing centre for Wales, in both languages, in a house with this particular weight of literary and political history. Since 1990, courses at Ty Newydd have run continuously: novelists, poets, dramatists, memoirists, beginners and Booker shortlists alike. The outbuilding, Hafoty, holds tutor accommodation. Six more guest rooms upstairs. The waiting lists run long for the summer poetry weeks. Wales has a long, unbroken literary tradition -- the bardic schools were active a thousand years ago -- and Ty Newydd is the place where that line continues, in the room next door to where one of the most important Welshmen in history drew his last breath.
The view from the library window is part of the point. Williams-Ellis insisted on it when he was working on the room for Lloyd George. The grounds drop away to the south, past trees, toward the long sweep of Cardigan Bay. On a clear day you can see the Cambrian mountains across the water in mid-Wales, and the headland at Aberystwyth fifty miles down the coast. The light off the bay enters the library directly. Writers come here for the silence as much as for the workshops. Mobile signal is variable. The village has roughly 300 people. The pub is small. The river runs nearby, and the grave of David Lloyd George lies along it under his unmarked boulder. Sometimes a course will walk down to the grave together in the afternoon. The Welsh have a long memory for their own.
Located at 52.92N, 4.26W in the village of Llanystumdwy, just west of Criccieth on the north coast of Cardigan Bay. The house sits on the lower slopes above the River Dwyfor, with views south across the bay. Nearest airport: Llanbedr (EGOD) about 12 nm southwest along the coast; Caernarfon (EGCK) 12 nm north. Visible terrain: the headland of Criccieth Castle is a useful landmark immediately to the east. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 ft AGL along the coast. The grounds and walled monument to Lloyd George lie a short distance south along the river.