Since posting the below in 2018, Poundbury has grown at an alarming rate. It is still void of any modernist architectural interventions. It continues on its cosy vision of the past, seemingly loved by its inhabitants, who you rarely see walking its streets, let alone their kids. And, of course, it is no longer overseen by Prince Charles but is now overseen by 'King' Charles.
Dorset's grandest Waitrose in Poundbury, Dorset.
I have been living in Dorset since the late 1980’s. Ten miles north of my home is the town of Dorchester, famed for the great novelist Thomas Hardy and also the birth of trade unionism, with those six Tolpuddle Martyrs arrested on trumped-up charges and marched to the town to await trial in 1834 and their eventual deportation to Australia.
Another less significant event, which had some impact, started 24 years ago. Just a few miles west of Dorchester, the first houses of a new development appeared. It’s called Poundbury: the brainchild of future monarch Prince Charles and originally master-planned by the urban theorist and planner Léon Krier in the 1980s. With a cohort of ardent neoclassical architects (Quinlan and Francis Terry, James Gorst, John Simpson and Ben Pentreath) on board, the planned project is 50% completed. In the not-too-distant future, Poundbury will, I feel sure, dwarf the main town in size.
Variations of residences.
It is the realisation of Prince Charles’s particular take on architecture, and the resulting development is loved and loathed in equal measures. This model town consists of 35% social housing; is apparently designed as a sustainable development (including being carbon-neutral); and sits proudly facing Maiden Castle, a historic Iron Age hill fort.
Over the years, I have followed Poundbury’s progress with interest. Every six months or so, I drive around its ever-expanding streets to look at new vistas. The place is filled with every conceivable variation on 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century faux architectural styles, from Scottish baronial villas to Palladian mansions and from flint-clad cottages to miniature icing pink Gothic castles. More recently, Victorian ‘Shad Thames ’-style warehouses and white-rendered Rennie Mackintosh facsimiles have appeared. Think of Sir Clough Williams-Ellis’s creation Portmeirion in Wales, built between 1925 and 1975 in the style of an Italian village (made famous in the TV series ‘The Prisoner’), and you’ll get the picture.
The genesis of Poundbury, Sir Clough Williams-Ellis’s Portmeirion in Wales created in 1925.
Another inspiration is Seaside in Miami, USA, built in 1982 and designed by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
Two images of Thamestown in Shanghai, China, built in 2006.
It is the kind of model town replica that you find in gated communities in the US (Seaside in Miami was an early inspiration) or elsewhere, such as Thamestown in Shanghai, created in 2006 to give Chinese visitors a little piece of cobblestoned Tudor England, without having to leave their country.
Some variations in Poundbury's homes.
Dorset’s Poundbury has been described by the Ray-Ban-sunglasses-wearing architectural writer Jonathan Meades as a “cottagey slum” and a “Thomas Hardy theme park for slow learners”. He doesn’t mince words, that Mr Meades. But I feel sure that the young/old fogey Jacob Rees-Mogg would feel very much at home here amid the Hunter-wellies-wearing, Labrador-walking, Farrow & Ball inhabitants.
I was firmly against the notion of a pastiche town: Dorset’s own Disneyland. But while there are downsides (and I’ll come to those a little later), there are many things that I actually like. As I toured around last week, I was struck by the clever organic flow of the place and the juxtaposition of sizes and styles that rub together in a rather pleasing way. There are increasingly more focal points that help to lead you to central areas. The roads are wide, and no yellow parking restriction lines can be found anywhere. Signage is kept to a minimum, and the shops have discreet branding. The building materials used are a myriad of variations of real Portland and reconstituted stone, flint, and varieties of every conceivable brick colour and texture; some houses have blocked out windows to replicate the window tax era of the 17th–19th centuries. There is also a great deal of painted fibreglass, aping decorative cast iron. Standing in the middle of it all, you could be forgiven for imagining you were on a Hollywood backlot. It is all clever movie-production-style fakery.
The first buildings in Poundbury in the ’90s lacked finesse, with details rather too chunky, like mean-sized windows with overly chunky glassing bars. Many of those early dwellings now show wear and tear in this reasonably high-up and exposed part of Dorset. However, as the development has evolved, newer architects have appeared on the scene with keener eyes for detail. One of these is Ben Pentreath: a neoclassicist with a modern twist, rather like his hero, the late interior designer David Hicks. Pentreath trained at the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, working a five-year stint in New York and then with the Prince’s Foundation. So, it’s no surprise that he is well immersed in helping to realise this later phase of development of Poundbury with many other like-minded practitioners.
One of Ben Pentreath's creations in Poundbury.
But look outside of this regal utopia at the many smaller developments dotted around Dorset. You will find miserable little redbrick boxes akin to the old TV soap ‘Brookside’ slapped up by Wimpey or Barratt Homes for maximum profit for minimum effort or equally small local-stone-built affairs to approximate a regional feel.
These are the typical alternative new builds to Poundbury. Grim little boxes.
Zero design aesthetic, minimum effort for maximum profit—these are to be found from John O' Groats to Land's End.
But all are mean-spirited and soulless. What remains tugs on the coattails of Prince Charles’s ‘Little England’ view of the world. There is not one notable contemporary development of merit. So, if I had to choose between the incredibly depressing Brookside boxes or the Poundbury film set, I’d choose the latter. No, I wouldn’t: I’d keep looking. But it sums up the depressing state of 21st-century British domestic architecture.
What saddens me is that it could have been fantastic had the Poundbury idea been put in the hands of a group of inspiring contemporary architects with a genuine interest in developing new thinking in domestic architecture. You’ll find an example of what I mean in Harlow, Essex, in a scheme designed by architect Alison Brooks.
Alison Brooks Architects has new builds in Harlow, Essex.
She has inspired herself from the old black-tarred wooden Essex barns for her affordable housing scheme. Architects like her, Stanton Williams, Studio Partington and Hamson Barron Smith, along with a bunch of Scandinavian and Japanese architects, create modern, people-centred homes, rather than the egotistical ‘trophy building’ lot, who are screwing up London’s skyline at every turn.
Above is a range of domestic home designs from the UK, Europe, the US, and Japan, showing alternative possibilities to living in the past.
While I’m at it, back in Dorchester, a so-called ‘contemporary’ development is being built on the site of the old Eldridge Pope brewery. But cutting-edge modernism it isn’t: it is altogether mundane and extremely disappointing in appearance and is another lost architectural opportunity for the county.
The above is part of Dorchester's disappointing architectural design for Brewery Square development.
What amuses me most about Poundbury is that it is at its heart, and the highest point in the centre of the town is a Waitrose. There is no way it could have been a Lidl. It started its life as a ‘little Waitrose’, but last year, it expanded to three times its original size, packed to the hilt with Duchy produce in every aisle and with its cafe, where customers clad in Barbour puffer jackets and cavalry twill or heavyweight Yorkshire corduroy trousers sit sipping their free coffees while reading The Telegraph. It is a microcosm and a seeming bastion of retired, well-heeled, white, middle-class Englanders waiting patiently to get their country back in 2019 from those ghastly foreigners.
The Queen Mother looks down on her grandson's creation.
As one looks through the Waitrose cafe windows, just beyond Queen Mother Square, there stands a giant statue of the late Queen Mother looking down on passers-by to reinforce the feeling that all is well and that one is perfectly safe and secure in Dorset’s Poundbury.
The then Prince Charles on one of his regular visits to his model town.
Amazingly, after all of Prince Charles’s views about modernist architecture, made abundantly clear in his 1988 BBC documentary ‘A Vision of Britain’, he is now, along with Léon Krier, apparently planning a new project: a small modernist town. Krier added: “We will show them how to do it.”
Watch this space.
Since writing this post, The Guardian has published an interesting piece on the future of home building in the UK.