Prince Charles, now King, inspecting his new town in earlier days.
Prince Charles, now King, inspecting his new town in earlier days.
What will happen to the prince of planning now that he's King? Thirty years ago the then-Prince Charles decided to try his hand at town planning. He chose the town of Poundbury, a brand-new development on the English south coast, near Dorchester.
His ideas were already famous. "You have togive this much to the Luftwaffe," he once told a conference of town planners. "When it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble."
A proposed addition to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square was "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend". The National Theatre was "a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London". A library in Birmingham was "a place where books are incinerated, not kept".
Poundbury would have none of that. Instead, the Prince declared, "traditional British aesthetics" would prevail. The best things about medieval towns would be reclaimed, with all mod-cons.
Not a medieval town, but one that takes the best of what they offered.
"We have to reconnect with those traditional approaches and techniques," he wrote later, "honed over thousands of years, which, only in the 20th century, were seen as 'old-fashioned' and of no use in a progressive modern age."
The Guardian saw the result slightly differently. Up went "a merry riot of porticoes and pilasters, mansards and mouldings, sampling from the rich history of architectural pattern books with promiscuous glee", said their architectural writer.
It's called postmodernism. The Express wondered if the result was a "charming masterpiece or feudal Disneyland".
One extraordinary building, the "Royal Pavilion", has a triumphal arch on one side, a colonnaded frontage and some kind of large wedding cake on top. It's sited on "Queen Mother Square", right next to a faux-classical Grecian temple. The Royal Pavilion is actually an apartment block.
The "merry riot" isn't even real: much of the filigreed metalwork is painted fibreglass.
And yet Poundbury isn't all nostalgic nonsense. In the 1980s, postmodernism coincided with the birth of "new urbanism": the idea that the places we live – suburbs as well as city centres – should be walkable and affordable. That requires mixed development: homes, workplaces, shops, schools and recreation facilities all close together.
If you achieve it with energy efficiency and sustainable land use, all the better. And in Poundbury, that's exactly what they do. It works. The people don't use their cars much at all.
The thing about new urbanism is that just because it functions like Poundbury, it doesn't have to look like Poundbury.
In Poundbury, everything has been built new to look old.
There is no "good" style of architecture, only good and bad examples of every style. Provided the streets are pleasant to walk along, pedestrian-friendly urban design can have any aesthetic style you want.
"I have lost count of the times I have been accused of wanting to turn the clock back to some Golden Age," wrote Charles, a man who literally wears a golden crown.
But his pride is not merely in the pomp: his intention in Poundbury has always been to create affordable homes. He's helped create five more developments along the same lines.
Now what? As king, he's not supposed to be rude about architects or anyone else he doesn't like. But why not?
If the King wants to fulminate about modern trends he doesn't understand and encourage functional communities for the 21st century while he does it, who's going to stop him?
