The Prisoner Shop, Portmeirion

From the shop's website:

This is located in a building called The Round House (1959-60, listed Grade II, 1971) one of a pair of Baroque shops linked by an overhead walkway. ...

In 1966 Patrick McGoohan used the Round House as Number Six's residence in The Prisoner. The interiors were filmed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, Borehamwood. The interior of No. 6's house was an exact replica of his London home which is seen in the first episode.

The Round House is of course too small to accommodate a spacious lounge, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen and this can come as a surprise to visitors who know it from the television series. The building now houses Number Six, the Prisoner Shop.

British Pathe on Portmeirion

Talking of Portmeirion, British Pathe has two newsreels about it - one from 1939 and one from 1962.

In each case, click on the picture to go to the Pathe site and play the film.

Across the Cob to Portmeirion

One reason for spending a couple of nights in Porthmadog was its proximity to Portmeirion. So the next morning I took the narrow gauge railway across the Cob and got off at the halt at Boston Lodge. From there Portmeirion is a short walk.

All the book describe Clough Williams-Ellis's model village as "Italianate", but there is also a large element of English country house fantasy about it. This part springs from the same roots at Brideshead Revisited, and indeed Portmeirion also acted as a refuge for monumental architecture deemed surplus to requirements in post-war redevelopment.

It may have arisen out of aristocratic eccentricity, but today Portmeirion is the leading tourist attraction in North Wales. And boy does it know it. You may also have heard something about a television series being filmed there...

Sian Lloyd gets married in Portmeirion

The BBC reports:

ITV weather presenter Sian Lloyd, 49, has married her fiancé 10 months after they met. 

She wed motor racing entrepreneur Jonathan Ashman, 59, in the Gwynedd village of Portmeirion, the setting for the cult 1960s TV series The Prisoner. 

She had been engaged to Welsh Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik before they separated in December 2006.

Not only that:

Also reportedly there was former Prime Minister Tony Blair's son Euan, who is dating Mr Ashman's 19-year-old daughter Suzanne.