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1. [56]life & style

[57]

Royal Family

Prince Charles' experimental city is proving critics wrong

Bevan Shields16:44, Jul 25 2021
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Queen Elizabeth II tours the square in Poundbury, England on October
27, 2016. Poundbury is an experimental new town designed with
traditional urban principles championed by The Prince of Wales.
Justin Tallis/Getty Images
Queen Elizabeth II tours the square in Poundbury, England on October
27, 2016. Poundbury is an experimental new town designed with
traditional urban principles championed by The Prince of Wales.

ANALYSIS: After a three-hour drive through the English countryside, I
arrive in the town of Poundbury and climb out of the car to examine my
strange new surroundings.

To the right stands the imposing Duchess of Cornwall Inn, which borrows
its rich architectural detail from Palladio’s Convento della Carità in
Venice.

Next door, the neoclassical-style Strathmore House is bright yellow
like some sort of St Petersburg palace and boasts 14 giant Corinthian
pilasters topped by a pediment bearing the Queen Mother’s coat of arms.
In front of me the sprawling Royal Pavilion combines Greek Revival
details with Roman arcaded architecture.

These are not centuries-old buildings, though. They’re not even five
years old. They are, in fact, a fascinating experiment in urban design
championed by heir-to-the-throne and architecture critic-in-chief
[58]Prince Charles.

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Poundbury is an attempt to shape the future by taking inspiration from
the past. Alarmed by the “rape” of Britain’s historic cities during the
1970s and 1980s, Charles set about using this slice of Dorset in
south-west England to prove beauty, community and sustainability still
stand a chance against ugly modern architecture and unchecked suburban
sprawl.

Poundbury emerged from the mind of a future king, and in some places it
really shows. The piazza where I parked is called Queen Mother Square
and features a 3-metre bronze statue of her.

Some streets bear the names of racehorses owned by Charles’ adored late
grandmother. The Duchess of Cornwall Inn is a tribute to Camilla, who
pulled pints when the doors opened in 2016. The Queen once came to
inspect the local Waitrose supermarket.

Poundbury has attracted scathing reviews from the moment construction
began in 1993. Sneering critics have long written-off this place as
urban planning’s version of Disneyland; a fake and eerie royal vanity
project which resembles a flimsy film set or miniature golf course more
than any case study in how to build better.

“So many of the most vocal critics of Poundbury haven’t even been here,
or haven’t been for 25 years,” says architect Ben Pentreath, who
designed the Royal Pavilion and many of the town’s most beautiful
residential streets.

“The second problem is that so often the criticisms are purely
aesthetic and have little underlying understanding of what’s going on
beneath the surface. Having said that, Poundbury hasn’t of course
always got everything right. It was completely radical at the time, and
like all experiments it has had success and failures.”
Queen Elizabeth II leave the Duchess of Cornwall pub on October 27,
2016 in Poundbury, England.

Justin Tallis/Getty Images

Queen Elizabeth II leave the Duchess of Cornwall pub on October 27,
2016 in Poundbury, England.

Design critic Stephen Bayley once said to visit Poundbury is to be
delivered to the furniture floor of a provincial department store in
1954, translated into architecture. It is fake, heartless,
authoritarian and grimly cute, he railed. Architect and television
presenter Piers Taylor calls it an “overpriced dormitory town”.

For a few hours after arriving I started to wonder whether they might
have a point. A first encounter with the rambling layout and collision
of architectural themes can be as disorienting as stepping out into the
sunlight after watching a movie in a dark cinema.

Poundbury’s main problem is that so many parts work so well that the
bits that don’t really stand out. The use of cheaper, modern
construction materials in some projects feels at odds with the overall
traditionalist mission, while several buildings are just downright
offensive.

The town’s pseudo-Georgian fire station ranks as one of the worst. The
Guardian called it a “dumpy neoclassical Georgian palace with three
garage doors attached”. The structure is so confused it made it onto a
list of contenders for Britain’s worst building in 2009.

Pounduryâs unfortunate fire station services the Dorchester region.

Bevan Shields/Sydney Morning Herald

Pounduryâs unfortunate fire station services the Dorchester region.

There’s a curious lack of central green space, too, although that has
been rectified in more recent phases of the development. And while
Poundbury is easy to walk around, cars are ever present. Queen Mother
Square often resembles a packed commuter carpark, diminishing the
aesthetic strength of its surrounding structures.

But after two days wandering the streets and talking to residents who
have forked out big money to be guinea pigs in this experiment, it’s
clear Poundbury’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses.

Pentreath recalls once entering a competition to design Poundbury’s
first public space, Pummery Square, as a promising young architecture
student. He named a proposed pub The White Elephant – a tongue-in-cheek
nod to the many people who thought Poundbury was an expensive folly
doomed to fail. “How wrong they were,” Pentreath says now.

The project has been such a triumph that construction is about to start
on its fourth and final stage. Once that is finished in 2024 Poundbury
will be home to 4500 residents. A similar project is also underway in
Nansledan, on the outskirts of the Cornish coastal town of Newquay.

“Most of the criticism is typical of what we tend to have in this
country – a group of people who always want to criticise success,” says
Blake Holt, the chairman of Poundbury’s residents association.

Poundbury Residents Association chair Blake Holt outside his flint-clad
home.

Bevan Shields/Sydney Morning Herald

Poundbury Residents Association chair Blake Holt outside his flint-clad
home.

“We’ve got to be careful to avoid a Utopian expectation of this place
because it’s inevitable that if you build something on this scale that
is so innovative, some things will go wrong from time to time.”

A cynic might wonder whether some of the criticism is really more about
the project’s champion. Charles has been a powerful thorn in the side
of modernists since he dared question the architects and developers who
inflicted terrible damage on Britain in the ’70s and ’80s.

Birmingham’s post-industrial building boom had left the city a
“monstrous concrete maze”, Charles once declared, while the city’s new
Brutalist library – since demolished – looked “like a place where books
are incinerated, not kept”.

He likened the jostling scrum of concrete towers enveloping London’s
magnificent St Paul’s Cathedral to “a basketball team standing shoulder
to shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa”. The Brutalist National
Theatre on the South Bank was “like a clever way of building a nuclear
power station without anyone objecting”.

“Can you imagine the French doing this sort of thing in Paris, on the
banks of the Seine around the Notre Dame?” he asked in 1988. Planners,
he said, had become out of step with so many Londoners who felt
powerless to resist the destruction of their city. “The London that
slowly evolved after the Great Fire [in 1666] took about 300 years to
build. It took about 15 years to destroy.”

He once told a group of politicians, planners and architects: “You have
to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings,
it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did
that.”

Prince Charles, left and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall drink a half pint
of “The Duchess” ale inside the Duchess of Cornwall pub on October 27,
2016 in Poundbury, England.

WPA Pool/Getty Images

Prince Charles, left and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall drink a half pint
of “The Duchess” ale inside the Duchess of Cornwall pub on October 27,
2016 in Poundbury, England.

His most potent intervention was a polemic speech at the 150th
anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects in which he
attacked plans for a modernist extension to the National Gallery on
Trafalgar Square.

“I would understand better this type of high-tech approach if you
demolished the whole of Trafalgar Square and started again with a
single architect responsible for the entire layout, but what is
proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and
elegant friend,” he said.

The comparison was so devastating that the project was cancelled. Had
it gone ahead it almost certainly would have been torn down by now. The
eventual expansion, known as the Sainsbury Wing, is far from perfect
either but is much more sensitive than the proposed monstrosity Charles
so despised.

Three years after the infamous carbuncle speech, the Prince of Wales
got word that West Dorset District Council wanted to expand the market
town of Dorchester on land to the west owned by [63]the Duchy of
Cornwall. The Duchy is a private estate of land holdings established by
Edward III in 1337 to provide an income for the heir to the throne.

The 160-hectare site would normally be sold but Charles seized on the
offer to instead propose a partnership to build an “exemplar
sustainable new community”. Luxembourg’s architect and urban theorist
Léon Krier designed a masterplan for a town which would eventually grow
to 2700 homes over four distinct phases.

“It’s about creating a place to live, not just a place to sleep,” says
Poundbury’s estate development manager Jason Bowerman. “The
architecture is an important element of it, but it’s also about
creating a community and priming all the elements that create that.”

Poundbury’s roads are deliberately chaotic and higgledy-piggledy to
calm traffic; there aren’t even give-way signs or line markings. Cars
driving west through a central spine have to go anti-clockwise around a
brick-and-timber gazebo (designed by Pentreath) which sits confidently
in the middle of the intersection.

“People sometimes say ‘why on earth are you building something which
sticks out into the street?’ and the answer is because it makes people
think a little bit more as they drive and be more responsible for their
actions,” Bowerman says. “And it adds to the diversity of design.”

The first thing you notice about Poundbury is the absence of things we
have allowed to overwhelm our towns and cities. There is not a
television antenna, garish shop advertisement, street sign or overhead
electricity wire to be seen.

Each home has its own unique character and design features.

Bevan Shields/Sydney Morning Herald

Each home has its own unique character and design features.

The Duchy issues licences to certain developers and controls design and
build quality via legally-binding agreements. Much of how the place
looks is dictated by a design code residents and builders must adhere
to. Copings – the finishing stones that sit on gables or parapets –
should be 75mm thick.

Nearly every house has been designed to incorporate at least one
chimney. A bird box is built discreetly into the walls of each new
dwelling. Windows and door frames should be timber and painted, with
approval rarely granted for metal-framed or powder-coated aluminium
products. The code even suggests six font types to be used in any house
name panels (letters must be kept to a maximum height of 4cm).

“The great majority of residents are happy with it – it’s what they
signed up to, literally,” Holt, the residents association chair, says
of the code. “There are quite a few myths about Poundbury, like that
you can’t hang your washing out or have to have approval for what
plants you place outside your front door. None of that is true.

“Yes, if you want to paint your front door a different colour you have
to get approval but most people are happy with that.”

A residential apartment building under construction.

Bevan Shields/Sydney Morning Herald

A residential apartment building under construction.

James Hart, for example, needed permission to install a discrete
drop-box for parcels outside the co-working space he has opened with
wife Vikki. “When we first moved to Dorchester about seven years ago,
Poundbury was a bit funny,” he says. “You would see all these houses
but no cars and no people. But in those seven years, it is totally
different. We think this is the right place to be as a business.”

The inconvenient truth for Poundbury’s critics is that the people who
live here love it. So do real estate agents. A three-bedroom apartment
in Pentreath’s Royal Pavilion is on the market for £1.4 million
(NZ$2.76 million) and most two-bedroom apartments or stand-alone homes
don’t go for less than £450,000. Real estate firm Savills estimates new
build values in Poundbury are nearly 29 per cent higher than other new
build schemes in the area.

Thirty-five per cent of homes are affordable housing reserved for rent,
shared ownership or discounted to the open market. It’s impossible to
distinguish private from public housing because the latter is built to
the same high standards as everything else, and it is evenly dispersed
throughout the town.

Says Pentreath: “It is rather amazing to think that we have a site
where a single landowner, a single masterplanner and a very small group
of architects conceived – over a relatively short period of time – to
build a settlement that is self-consciously designed to look and feel
as if it had evolved over a 300 or 400-year period.

“That is quite an extraordinary thing – unprecedented in history. Maybe
it betrays a lack of confidence in a world where so many megalomaniac
planned architectural schemes had had such disastrous results.”

It helped that Charles found a kindred spirit in Krier. The architect
is highly protective of his co-collaborator and says anyone who
compares Poundbury to Disneyland has never been to the Los Angeles
theme park.

“I had many clients before the Prince of Wales and whenever there was
the slightest difficulties with the media they would immediately give
up,” Krier said several years ago. “The Prince of Wales stuck through
it though.

“I’m not a royalist but he is a heroic character who through his
actions is giving royalty in this country a legitimacy it didn’t have.”

The future king must have felt vindicted on Tuesday when Housing
Secretary Robert Jenrick pledged a series of reforms to put “beauty”
back into planning in Britain, citing poll after poll showing the
public prefers homes built before the 1947 Planning Act than those
after.

It is the latest public win for the 72-year-old royal, whose[64]
lifelong interest in climate change and the environment is also
striking a chord with concerned Brits.

The centrepiece of the government’s reforms will be design codes for
each local area, similar to the one in Poundbury. Jenrick noted the
link between shoddy houses and poorly planned suburbs on quality of
life and mental health was well known, but less explored was how the
decline in quality and beauty since the postwar period had corresponded
with rising opposition to new housing.

“The case for new housing is more important than ever but it is also
more difficult to make than ever,” he says. “So far from beauty and
quality being a luxury, it’s clear they are key to unlocking community
consent for development and housing.”

Pentreath says Charles can feel partly responsible for the government’s
new focus on urban aesthetics.

“Of course, I won’t be surprised if bog-standard house building carries
on business as normal for a very long time – it’s like turning around a
huge oil tanker,” he says. “But I do feel myself a shift in the
tectonic plates, and that is in no small measure thanks to His Royal
Highness.

“So much of what the prince has been talking about for so long now
appears curiously visionary rather than reactionary, as he was labelled
for so many years.”

Sydney Morning Herald
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