“Almost 30 years since the masterplan was drawn up for this
400-acre site on the edge of Dorchester, Poundbury has finally received its town
centre in the form of Queen Mother Square. If the first phase, built in the
early 90s, was based on a villagey “Dorset vernacular”, this grandiloquent
piazza has cranked up the dial to full Greco-Roman. A doric colonnade marches
along the front of a new Waitrose on one side, facing the yellow facade of
Strathmore House across the square. Strathmore, a palatial pile that could have
been airlifted in from St Petersburg, contains eight luxury apartments beneath
its royal-crested pediment. Next door stands the white stone heft of the
Duchess of Cornwall, Poundbury’s first hotel, based on Palladio’s Convento
della Carità in Venice, natch.”
A royal revolution: is Prince Charles's model village having
the last laugh?
Poundbury, the Prince of Wales’s traditionalist village in
Dorset, has long been mocked as a feudal Disneyland. But a growing and diverse
community suggests it’s getting a lot of things right
Oliver Wainwright
@ollywainwright
Thu 27 Oct 2016 09.00 BST Last modified on Fri 11 May 2018
13.09 BST
‘This supposed ghost town feels increasingly like a real
place’ … Prince Charles visits Poundbury in 2013.
In a room of raw
concrete block walls and exposed steel beams, a man with a long hipster beard
takes an order on his iPad and froths up a flat white. Young mums and retired
couples sit at long communal tables among Wi-Fi workers. It could be a trendy
east London cafe in a repurposed industrial space, but this is the centre of
Poundbury, the Prince of Wales’s traditionalist model village in Dorset. And
there’s not a doily or tweed jacket in sight.
Something quietly
radical has been going on here – and it's got nothing to do with architecture
“It’s not quite what most people expect,” says Ben
Pentreath, one of the architects who have been engaged in producing replica
Georgian terraces and quaint country cottages here over the last two decades.
In jeans and New Balance trainers, the designer isn’t quite what you would
expect from a classical architect, either. “For 20 years, this place has been
treated as a joke, a whim of HRH,” he says. “But something quietly radical has
been going on – and it’s got nothing to do with architecture.”
It is easy to get distracted by the buildings. From
flint-clad cottages and Scottish baronial villas to Palladian mansions and
miniature pink gothic castles, Poundbury is a merry riot of porticoes and
pilasters, mansards and mouldings, sampling from the rich history of
architectural pattern books with promiscuous glee. On the outside of its
breeze-block walls, Pentreath’s Butter Cross bakery is dressed as an early
19th-century brick gazebo, crowned with a gilded fibreglass orb. It looks on to
a little market square, where cast-iron verandahs face off against a creamy
rendered terrace, watched over by a neoclassical office block that is raised on
an arcaded plinth. It might seem grand for a village square, but it’s nothing
compared with the latest set-piece tableau a few streets away, unveiled by the
Queen today.
Almost 30 years since the masterplan was drawn up for this
400-acre site on the edge of Dorchester, Poundbury has finally received its
town centre in the form of Queen Mother Square. If the first phase, built in
the early 90s, was based on a villagey “Dorset vernacular”, this grandiloquent
piazza has cranked up the dial to full Greco-Roman. A doric colonnade marches
along the front of a new Waitrose on one side, facing the yellow facade of
Strathmore House across the square. Strathmore, a palatial pile that could have
been airlifted in from St Petersburg, contains eight luxury apartments beneath
its royal-crested pediment. Next door stands the white stone heft of the
Duchess of Cornwall, Poundbury’s first hotel, based on Palladio’s Convento
della Carità in Venice, natch.
“The silent majority
like this sort of building,” says 79-year-old , one of Prince Charles’s
favourite architects, who designed most of the buildings around the square with
his son Francis. Walk around the back and you find a cheeky nod to the
stage-set nature of the place: here the columns and capitals are simply painted
on to the facade. “It’s the poor man’s choice,” says Terry, “but it makes it
more poetic.”
It’s easy to come
here and compare it unfavourably with a 300-year-old town. But it’s just a
modern housing estate
The residents of the new square will be anything but poor.
Flats in Strathmore House have sold for £750,000, while apartments in the Royal
Pavilion, complete with a spa, are likely to cost even more when they’re
released next year. Sprouting from this block (which “brings to Dorchester
design standards normally associated with Knightsbridge”), a 40-metre-high
tower now rises above the square, visible from far around. It’s an odd beast,
looking a bit like an inflated Georgian townhouse perched on top of the Arc de
Triomphe, crowned with a domed pavilion and a little bright green pergola. It’s
based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, says Pentreath, who
clearly had a field day with his pattern books on this particular job. But the
tallest edifice in the area by far didn’t happen without a struggle.
“There was a real plot to stop the tower because of the
landscape impact,” says Léon Krier, the Luxembourgian architect who drew up the
Poundbury masterplan at the Prince’s request in 1989 and has overseen the
development. “But we wanted to impact the landscape. The whole point of a
monumental building is to create a landmark.”
We are engaged in
creating a convincing fake. All architecture is essentially wallpaper:
underneath, it’s all the same
The grand palazzo next to the tower was intended to be a
magistrate’s court, but the plan was changed to make it more economically
viable. “Perhaps it’s an interesting symbol, being luxury flats,” says Krier.
“That’s the spirit of our time. After all, the masterplanner is not the master
of the game.”
If Poundbury is a game, it is one that has become a good
deal more convincing over time. For years derided as a feudal Disneyland, where
Prince Charles could play at being planner like Marie Antoinette with her toy
hamlet in Versailles, this supposed ghost town feels increasingly like a real
place. The quality of the early phases was mixed – even Krier admits there were
some “ghastly mistakes” – and construction has certainly improved. But strip
away the fancy dress and you find a plan that far exceeds the sophistication
achieved by any modern housebuilder.
Now two-thirds complete, this “urban extension” is home to a
community of more than 3,000 residents, with around 1,500 homes (35% of which
are let at affordable rent, pepper-potted throughout the development) and 2,000
jobs in 185 businesses. It has industry, shops and small workshop units mixed
in among terraced streets, apartment blocks, mews houses and squares, arranged
in such a way that the layout of buildings defines the street pattern, rather
than being straitjacketed into a car-dominated grid. The streets are winding
and deliberately chaotic to calm traffic, with blind bends and no stop signs or
any other signage, while each neighbourhood is planned to be no more than a
five-minute walk to its centre.
Still, the progressive attitude to cars hasn’t curbed
habits: a survey conducted at the end of the first phase showed that car use
was higher in Poundbury than in the surrounding rural district of West Dorset.
The free-for-all parking policy, meanwhile, has turned many of the streets and
squares into a car park for Dorchester shoppers.
But the chief success has been achieving the holy grail of
genuine mixed use. As well as the medical clinics and vets, offices of lawyers
and accountants, travel agents and a funeral home, there is a thriving
chocolate and cereal factory, a tech company making components for plane wings,
along with 80 small units for startup businesses scattered among the porticoes.
“We sort of reinvented medieval workshops by mistake,” says Poundbury’s estate
director, Simon Conibear, listing the enterprises, ranging from those making
cakes and wedding dresses to curtains and electric bikes, two-thirds of which
are run by women.
A primary school is also under construction, reflecting the
increasing number of young families moving to Poundbury. “I thought it was a
retirement village,” says Aaron Watkins, who opened menswear shop Clath here
last month, stocking Red Wing and YMC, rather than Hunter and Barbour. “But
it’s a really mixed demographic with loads of younger people moving down from
London.”
Despite the leaded windows, the place has impressive energy
credentials, too. An anaerobic digester nearby uses local farm waste to create
enough fuel to power up to 56,000 homes on the Dorset grid, as well as charging
the electric blue bus that trundles between Poundbury and Dorchester (bridging
the “us and them” divide, which has softened over the years). So does this
quaint experiment deserve all the derision?
“It’s easy to come here and compare it unfavourably with a
300-year-old town,” says Pentreath. “But it’s just a modern housing estate. If
you look at a 1989 suburban development, it’s all identical two-storey brick
houses, with a business park on the edge if you’re lucky. Here you’ll find a
terrace of social housing opposite a big private house designed by the same architect,
and a sense of genuine civic life.” Despite being on Duchy of Cornwall land, it
is a hard-nosed commercial project, developed by local housebuilders who sell
their product at a premium. A recent Savills survey found that values in
Poundbury were up to 29% higher than on other new build schemes in the area.
We went a bit crazy
and thought we'd do a bit of Shoreditch … HRH loves things that are quirky
Ben Pentreath
As for aesthetics, there has been much hand-wringing in the
architectural community over the “honesty” of Poundbury, questioning how
faithful it is to both the local vernacular (it’s not) and natural materials
(ditto), two of the prince’s primary tenets. Most of the stone is
reconstituted, the traditional facades hide steel frames and blockwork walls,
and much of the “metalwork” is painted fibreglass. Krier professes truth to
materials, but Pentreath is frank. “We are engaged in creating a convincing
fake,” he says. “All architecture is essentially wallpaper: underneath, it’s
all the same stuff.”
The latest phase, which he has designed with fellow young
classicist George Saumarez Smith, casts its stylistic net even wider to include
what look like converted Victorian warehouses. “We went a bit crazy and thought
we’d do a bit of Shoreditch or Shad Thames,” he says, pointing out the
polychromatic brickwork and steel girder lintels above the shopfronts. “For the
next phase we’re thinking of more of an Arts and Crafts vibe. HRH loves things
that are quirky.”
Poundbury should be completed by 2025, by which time it will
be home to an estimated 4,500 people, increasing Dorchester’s population by a
quarter. Then the Duchy will leave it to run itself. Krier, who is writing a
book on Le Corbusier, says he and Prince Charles will then embark on their
ultimate project: “We are going to build a small modernist town and show them
how to do it.”
This article was amended on 27 October 2016. An earlier
version incorrectly ascribed Ben Pentreath’s pull-quote to George Saumarez
Smith
"Forests … are in fact the world’s air-conditioning
system—the very lungs of the planet—and help to store the largest body of
freshwater on the planet … essential to produce food for our planet’s growing
population. The rainforests of the world also provide the livelihoods of more
than a billion of the poorest people on this Earth… In simple terms, the
rainforests, which encircle the world, are our very life-support system—and we
are on the verge of switching it off."
— Charles, Prince of Wales
 |
"Following Charles Prince of Wales in his admirable
and remarkable idealistic journey of selfless dedication in fields such as
architecture, urbanism, ecology, organic farming, alternative medicine... etc.,
we found that the priority of its Concerns lies in using the prestige of his
position and the symbolic power of his title for the sake of the common good.
In this sense he honors his motto (ICH DIEN) in his attitude
of "Oblige"... and it can be said that his concern, through a
personal process of search and acts, essentially resides in being first a '
Gentleman '. In order to become a prince of/with Alma. "(prince of / with
Soul)
The Gentleman in 12 19 (Summer 2018) by António Sérgio Rosa
de Carvalho/Architectural Historian.
|
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Manifesto of Leon Krier, advisor to Principe Carlos,
published in 2000 and translated by me in a joint initiative with Krier, in
order to disseminate his ideas to the public in the Portuguese language
Arquitectura: Escolha ou Fatalidade ( Architecture: Choice
Or Fate )
LEON KRIER / Translation: António Sérgio Rosa de Carvalho/Architectural Historian.
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