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 BSTLast modified on Wed 23 Sep 2020 15.28 BST
‘This supposed ghost town feels increasingly like
a real place’
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
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