Gwyn Headley


Gwyn Headley is a British entrepreneur, architectural historian and writer.

Education and early life

As a child Headley lived in Accra, Gold Coast ; Krumpendorf, Austria; Berlin, Germany; Warsaw, Poland; Westmalle, Belgium and Paris, France before his family settled in Chelsea in 1959. He was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, Hertford, Westminster City School, London, and at Saint Martin's School of Art, London.
Living in Chelsea in the 1960s, he formed The Sloane Squares, a beat group which played many venues across the capital, supporting John Lee Hooker, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, the Small Faces, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton and others. Lead singer Pete Gage later became the front man for Dr. Feelgood.
He now lives in London and Harlech.

Business

He began work in book publishing in 1967 at George Newnes and started his first consultancy Headley Hesketh Associates in 1976. This evolved into HPR, a publishing and theatre marketing consultancy which promoted several West End hits and had nine No. 1 best-sellers, including The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady.
In 1991 with Keith Price he launched Pavilions of Splendour Ltd, the first estate agency to deal exclusively in listed buildings, and which in 1993 became the first UK estate agency to have a website. The agency closed after Keith Price died in 2004.
In 2002 HPR was taken over by fotoLibra. the first open access, entirely digital picture library was created by Headley in 2002 and launched in 2004. A digital publishing company within the group, Heritage Ebooks, was launched in 2011 with forty titles.

Mah-Jong

Headley is President of the British Mah-Jong Association. With Yvonne Seeley he wrote Know The Game: Mah-Jong in 1977. The book has sold over 500,000 copies and is the standard rule book for the game in Britain and the Commonwealth.

Follies

An enthusiast of eccentric architecture since childhood, his first book on follies, written with Dutch art historian, was published for the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty by Jonathan Cape in 1986. The publication of the book led to the foundation of the amenity society and charity The Folly Fellowship, of which Headley was President. He has since written and co-written five further printed books on the subject, and forty ebooks. He describes a folly as 'a misunderstood building', and elaborates on this in an introduction: "Ideally, should be a big, Gothick, ostentatious, over-ambitious and useless structure, preferably with a wildly improbable local legend attached – but in real life it must be admitted that follies defy even such broad definitions. That's half the pleasure of the things: if they could be categorised and catalogued and pinned down like specimen butterflies we would lose that frisson of excitement and mystery when another unidentified ghostly grey ruin looms up out of a wet wood. A folly is essentially a misunderstood building, because folly can only lie in the eye of the beholder."

Typography

Headley's first essay on typography, Fabulous Fonts, was published by Pomegranate in 2001. Cassell Illustrated published his Encyclopaedia of Fonts in 2005. The author blurb described him as follows: "Gwyn Headley’s comfortably blurred memories of the 1960s include failing to become a rock star and instead discovering a passion for typography at St. Martin’s School of Art in London’s Charing Cross Road. He has somehow combined a lifetime in publishing with writing books on architecture, follies, fonts and Mah-Jong; selling listed buildings; and founding fotoLibra.com, the world’s first entirely digital picture library. He has spent six months of his life at the Frankfurt Book Fair and to his eternal regret has never scored a try for Llanelli or Wales."

Blogs

Headley currently writes two blogs, the fotoLibra Pro Blog, which deals with photography, image sales and digital publishing, and From Harlech to London, his personal blog which concentrates on his interests, hobbies and opinions. The latter is notable for its typically British self-deprecating autobiography: "Gwyn describes himself as enthusiastic, lazy, persistent, creative, fat, well-educated, pedantic, polite, greedy, gentle, prejudiced, kind, unreliable, well-meaning, curious, shy, gregarious, snobbish, confident, cowardly, optimistic, comfortable, irritable, at ease, nervous, thirsty, tired, willing, competent, unselfconscious, spry, hard-working, querulous, prolix and cheerful. His favourite word is Sharawaggi, he would like his double helix to combine musicality and common sense, he has a huge vocabulary in several languages and no grammar in any. He enjoys drinking, eating, women, reading, writing, urban walking, typefaces, architecture, guitars, rugby, cricket, F1, Wales, London, the USA and Europe. He dislikes ‘features’, ‘slebrities’ and ‘communities’. He describes enjoyment as a two-bottle lunch with an old friend. He is married, with a tortoise, two mogs and a Golden Retriever."

Ffordd Pen Llech

In 2019 Headley led the successful campaign to get Ffordd Pen Llech in his hometown of Harlech, North West Wales, recognised by Guinness World Records as the steepest street in the world.

Personal life

He married Yvonne Seeley in 2008 at St John's Chapel in the Tower of London.

Books