King Charles III's 'Make Britain Great Again'
village
Poundbury mixes progressive city building with an
aesthetic steeped in nostalgia for an idealized past.
BY AITOR HERNÁNDEZ-MORALES
MAY 4, 2023
4:03 AM CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/king-charles-iiis-make-britain-great-again-village/
POUNDBURY,
England — The town of Poundbury may be located three hours south of London, but
aesthetically it feels as if it’s centuries removed from the dense, modern
British capital.
The
experimental development’s streets are lined with quaint but elegant brick
homes straight out of a BBC adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, Victorian
terrace houses and vaguely Gothic cottages. Beyond them, there are
Regency-style townhouses, Palladian mansions and a square dominated by what
appears to be a miniature version of Buckingham Palace.
At first
glance, the place seems grand and storied, but as you wander from one
architectural pastiche to another, the quaint, historic village feels
disconcertingly fake.
That’s
because it is: Prior to 1993 this rainy, windswept corner of Dorset was just
muddy farmland, but for the past 30 years Prince Charles — the
soon-to-be-crowned Charles III — has used it to build a physical representation
of what he thinks British communities should look like.
With its
endless array of colonnades and porticoes, it’s easy to dismiss Poundbury as
just another eccentric project championed by Charles, who also launched an
organic food brand and a controversial charity to push alternative medicine
during the long decades he spent waiting to inherit the throne.
But the
model village is more than a royal lark: It’s a calling card for the new king’s
idealized vision of his country — one remarkably well-matched with that of
post-Brexit Britain.
A prince with a grudge
Tidy
streets and historic-looking homes give Poundbury a naturally genteel look, but
in many ways, the model village is a 400-acre “fuck you” from Charles to the
British architectural elites.
During the
1980s, the then-prince decided to break with his mother’s famed discretion and
forge his own public persona by commenting on social issues, an approach he
hoped would make the out-of-touch monarchy seem more relatable to the public.
Improbably,
one of the topics he seized upon was the scourge of modern architecture, which
Charles believes has “de-personalized and defaced” Britain’s towns and cities
by filling them with a built environment that fails to reflect “civic virtues
such as courtesy, consideration and good manners.”
For years
Charles used public appearances to rail against brutalist buildings like
London’s National Theatre, which he derided as looking like “a nuclear power
station,” criticize the “unmitigated disaster” that is Birmingham’s
concrete-heavy city center and mock the vaguely Scandinavian British Library
headquarters, which he referred to as “a dim collection of sheds groping for
some symbolic significance.”
More
controversially, he campaigned against projects that ended up being scrapped.
These included a proposed glass skyscraper designed by Mies van der Rohe that
would have been the legendary architect’s first and only project in the U.K.,
as well as several buildings by Charles’ architectural bête noire, Richard Rogers,
the Pritzker Prize-winning architect behind Paris’ Centre Pompidou.
The
prince’s broadsides were ridiculed by the architectural establishment, who
pointed out that Charles had no formal education in architecture and urbanism
and was just some random royal railing against the modern world.
But rather
than be cowed by their rebuke, Charles dug in, publishing “A Vision of
Britain,” his 1989 manifesto/coffee table book/hit BBC special in which he laid
out his case against “an avant-garde that has become the establishment” and
argued in favor of small, beautiful, pedestrian-friendly communities.
That same
year he decided to take things further with Poundbury, an extension of the
market town of Dorchester, which the prince aimed to develop to show the world how
urbanism is done.
By building
the model village on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall — the private estate
controlled by the eldest surviving son of the English monarch since 1337 —
Charles could exercise strict control over its design and ensure it was in line
with his vision of urban life.
Rules, rules, rules
On a
recent, rainy morning Simon Standish, a semi-retired consultant, sat in the
kitchen of his recently built Georgian manse, which lies between Poundbury’s
neoclassical Queen Mother Square and the soon-to-be-completed memorial garden
commemorating the late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
After
decades spent living outside of London, Standish and his wife, both
empty-nesters, moved to the village, “drawn by the architecture, the safe
community and looking to do something totally different with our lives.”
Standish,
who is a member of the Love Poundbury residents association, says he has no
regrets about the move, but he admits that there are strange aspects to life in
Poundbury, especially in relation to the Duchy of Cornwall, which exercises
outsized control over all the aesthetic elements with legally-binding
agreements included in the sales contracts for properties in the village.
“You have
to work with approved local builders and when the building is done, the Duchy
has to come inspect it and sign off on it,” said Standish. The attention to
detail is so intense that the Duchy refused to sign off on his home until he
moved the burglar alarm from the side of a rear wall to the center, presumably
for the sake of symmetry.
Standish
concedes that rigor is required to keep up the beauty of the village, but with
a consultant’s eye, he questions more inefficient design choices.
“Charles
doesn’t want clutter, so there aren’t any overt signs in Poundbury: They have
to be discreet,” he explained. “That’s actually a problem for some shops
because you can’t really tell where they are … Something’s going to have to
change because otherwise, they’ll just go out of business.”
Standish
said that while Poundbury’s narrow, curving streets were designed to dissuade
speeding, the lack of road signs in the village made implementing additional
measures difficult.
“There’s a
big debate at the moment around lowering the speed limit from 30 to 20 miles
per hour in urban areas in Dorset County but there’s been foot-dragging because
that might require us to install signage, road bumps or put marking on the
roads that might come up against some of the aesthetic design issues,” he said.
Similarly,
Standish said that the fixation on aesthetics made it difficult for Poundbury
to be the sustainable place Charles envisioned and complained that the Duchy
had been slow to back the installation of solar panels in the village.
In a
statement, the Duchy said it had already approved some solar panel
installations and said all homes are heated by renewable energy sources. Since
the early 2000s, the town has been partially powered by renewal gas from the
U.K.’s first biomethane-to-grid anaerobic digestion plant, but Standish
questioned whether this is truly a sign of sustainability in 2023.
“How green
can Poundbury be when last year we moved into a newly built home with a gas
boiler?” he said.
Buildings before people
More
broadly, Standish argued that the village fails to successfully integrate its
over 4,200 residents.
While he
praised Charles for building a substantial amount of handsome, low-income homes
that are indistinguishable from those owned by wealthier residents, he argued
that little effort had been invested in building a truly mixed community.
“There
aren’t really community spaces to facilitate integration,” said Standish. He
pointed out that while the village had been designed to be in line with 1980s
New Urbanism concepts, which emphasize walkability and outdoor interactions,
many of its squares are glorified parking lots and all are exposed to the
frequently inclement weather.
“People
don’t really mingle in the parks, and since most homes don’t have front
gardens, they don’t really interact in the streets either,” he said. “You might
rub shoulders in the pub, but going there costs money.”
The
resident’s association to which Standish belongs is trying to change that with
a participative democracy experiment called the Big Conversation, in which
locals are invited to share their views on how to make Poundbury a better place
in which to live.
So far,
many participants have used the opportunity to complain about the Duchy’s
relationship toward them, which one resident who chose to remain anonymous
summarized as being “semi-feudal.”
In a
statement, a spokesperson for the Duchy disputed this characterization,
asserting that it “maintains regular and productive dialogue with both
individuals and representative bodies of the local community in Poundbury to
ensure the ongoing success of the community for the benefit of all.”
Standish
said he read Charles’ 1989 book while preparing the survey, so as to “move past
the buildings and see what kind of a society he was trying to generate here.”
The
problem, however, is that the prince was “elusive” about that part of his
vision.
“I’ve never
met Charles, but the sense I get from living here is that he’s an incurable
romantic with interesting ideas around the fit of human to environment,” said
Standish. “I’m just not sure how realistic he is around these kinds of notions
and how they relate to people.”
A royal statement
Charles
isn’t the first English monarch to use architecture to make a statement.
Norman and
Plantagenet kings like William the Conqueror and Edward I built castles like
Windsor and Caernarfon to assert their dominance over England and, later,
Wales.
Much later,
Henry VIII showed off Tudor grandeur with luxurious buildings like the
now-vanished Nonsuch Palace, while Charles I aspired to build an even grander
celebration of the Stuart dynasty in Whitehall — and would have done so if
parliament hadn’t first chopped off his head.
But for the
past century, Charles’ direct predecessors largely abandoned the tradition of
kingly construction.
“Since the
death of Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, the royal family hasn’t
really shown an interest in architecture and instead focused on sport,” said
William Whyte, professor of Social and Architectural History at St John’s
College, Oxford. “In Queen Elizabeth II’s case, the predominant interest seems
to have been horse racing.”
In
returning to the building tradition, Whyte said Charles was a surprise because
he wasn’t using it to celebrate his personal power or wealth but rather to
vindicate “an ideological revivalism that’s pronounced and countercultural,
deliberately attempting to dethrone modernism and return to a mix of vernacular
architecture and classicism.”
Whyte
compared Poundbury to fantasy projects like Marie Antoinette’s Hameau de la
Reine, a model rustic village where the queen could escape the protocol of
Versailles and cosplay as a peasant.
In this
case, Charles, a man raised in a series of palaces, put together “an odd
collection of English idioms, organized to express his idea of what a perfect,
organic community ought to be like.”
Samuel
Hughes, a research fellow at Oxford and head of housing at the center-right
Centre for Policy Studies think tank, said that Charles’ war on modernism “gave
voice to the unease that many people felt about a lot of building projects.”
Hughes
suggested that Poundbury’s aesthetics weren’t that unusual — “nearly all
housing developments are at least clumsily traditional.” Instead, he argued its
early emphasis on integrated affordable housing, pedestrian-friendly streets
and mixed-use urbanism made it stand out for being ahead of trends that are
seen today as hallmarks of good city-building.
For all its
progressive urbanism, however, Whyte said that there’s something distinctly
Brexit-y about Charles’ model village in its attempt to “condemn the experts
and the elites of the architectural profession” while promoting an aesthetic
steeped in nostalgia for Britain’s past.
“Classical
architecture is, at its origin, the architecture of empire, world domination,
radical inequality,” said Whyte. “In backing this idealized, historic English
architecture it’s worth asking what other architecture, and what people, are
being excluded from the narrative.”
Poundbury
resident Standish, who campaigned against Brexit, acknowledged these issues had
been on his mind when he moved to the village.
“I come
from a European Jewish background and, to me, Brexit was England in a great
retreat into some romantic older period that doesn’t make any sense,” he said,
adding that in moving from multicultural, global London to Poundbury, a
historical-pastiche village in “predominantly white, not particularly affluent
Dorset,” he had felt as if he’d “retreated a bit as well.”
Although he
says he’s ultimately found himself in a pleasant community full of people with
interesting backgrounds, Standish worries that Poundbury may struggle to
survive, and he points to the higher-than-average proportion of residents aged
over 65 and lower-than-average number of children as a major challenge.
“It’s a
beautiful place based on a romantic notion, and I’m not sure how it’s going to
weather in the long term,” he said. “If things don’t change, who is going to
move here? Probably more older people who are going to die off, and that’s not
really a recipe for success.”
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