Good Gwrych

garden terraces at Gwrych

In 1999, when I was looking for a building to restore, one candidate that emerged alongside Balintore was Gwrych Castle in Abergele, North Wales. 

In terms of the restoration required, Gwrych was an even more insane proposition. It is vast and almost totally derelict. On the other hand, it looks utterly magnificent. The way the blocks of the building are composed on the side of a hill is masterful, and they give an impression of a complete mediaeval citadel. The architectural term for the composition of building forms, skillful or otherwise,  is "massing". 

I investigated the status of the building online. It was owned by an absentee American businessman and there was a complex legal situation. "This will take 15 years to resolve." I guessed, and indeed that is more or less exactly how long it took! :-) But we are jumping ahead of ourselves.

I discovered there was a charity "The Gwrych Castle Preservation Trust" which had been started by a resident of Abergele called Mark Baker, when he was 12!  I started chatting to Mark by email (who was 15 at the time) for the situation on the ground. I have to say that things looked hopeless for the Trust, there was little they could do without ownership. So we wished each other well with our respective "distant prospect" projects. The legal side of Balintore took the next 8 years to sort out, and I finally bought it in 2007.

In 2018, Gwrych was finally bought by the Trust and I sent a message of  congratulations to Mark as I knew what a major and long-awaited turning point this was. 

In recent years Mark has visited Balintore a number of times, and I finally got the invite to visit Gwrych today for the first time. So it was very much closing-the-circle. Would Gwrych in-the-flesh get me as excited, as the prospect of restoring her did 20 years ago?

The answer is a resounding "YES"! :-) Despite the insanity, I would definitely have taken on the restoration of Gwrych if the red tape hadn't been there.

The only true way to get a feel for a building is to visit it, and I hadn't quite got my head around the nature of Gwrych. Gwrych and Abergele are inextricably intertwined: a number of massive gate lodges are dotted about the town. These cannot be ignored. The castle looms above the town, so every resident of Abergele in invested in the building. The grounds (236 acres) act as a vast park for the inhabitants. 

When I visited, it became clear the restoration of Gwrych is a dynamic community effort. There were around 30 volunteers in action: working on the gardens, working in the shop and building a number of Santas' grottos for the December season. As far as I can recall, Mark mentioned 3 full-time staff and 50 volunteers, benefitting from the fact Abergele is a retirement town. While most of the building is still in ruin, some areas have been restored and the gardens are zooming ahead. The dining room, now with a ceiling, is an astonishing space.

Most importantly, Gwrych is a going concern: an impressive sum was raised by their recent Halloween events. The money from the reality show "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here" when Gwrych stood-in for an Australian Jungle during Covid, has been of huge benefit. I have to say I was totally fooled by areas of "film set" stonework built for the program. Mark invited me to tap some of the walls: these were foam with a very convincing coating that had been carefully colour-matched to the walls of the castle.

Balintore needs to learn from the community and team aspects of Gwrych. I talked to a number of the volunteers and they were universally lovely. They have taken much of the load off Mark, and he says this has been the best thing ever.

Mark had to attend a meeting on the Christmas ticket arrangements, which gave me a chance to really explore the building and grounds on my own and to pick up the vibes. Gwrych is not just a building, it is a 19th Century park that hosted tourists in the 19th and 20th Century. It could do so again in the 21st and indeed the grounds (paid entry!) are currently well used.

As you explore, there are certain areas where the massing of buildings and walls around you is entirely convincing: you could have stepped back in time to the middle ages. Massing is just as much about enclosed spaces as how buildings look on the horizon.

So Gwrych was a film set before there were film sets and Gwrych was a mediaeval fantasyland before there were theme parks. It is no accident Gwrych has been used for filming. Gwrych is the happy marriage between landscape, buildings and gardens. The castle is built on bedrock that is jutting out of the hill side, and seems to grow out of the ground.

What appears from ground level to be battlements, are in fact terraced formal gardens and scenic walkways.  In fact, it was only by studying some aerial photos recently, that I realised that around half the castle is actually fake and these are gardens masquerading as castle. While Gwrych Castle is large; things have been carefully orchestrated to make it appears even more monumental and impressive from ground level.

Now Gwrych is a good news story. The road ahead will not be an easy one, but at least there is a road and individuals that are prepared to walk on it. I had the ruined parts of the building to myself for a while, and there was still the unadulterated thrill of a vast abandoned building and yet there was comfort in rather than the normal despair for such a building's future.

loved this Neptune statue

P.S. My camera phone died within minutes of arriving at Gwrych - typical! Well, at least the two bad photos I took are mine. :-) Search online to see the full magnificence of the building.