The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  Architecture is the area in which the Prince’s amateur involvement has earned him probably more enemies than anywhere else; and where (apart from his private life) he has most divided opinion. From the night when he stood up at Hampton Court in 1984, as guest of honour at the 150th anniversary dinner of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and, as his audience of seven hundred settled back with brandy and cigars expecting to hear a few congratulatory words, tore the profession limb from limb, he has been accused of abusing his power. Architects, he said, were consistently designing buildings without a thought for the people who were to live in them, and called the proposed extension to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square ‘a kind of vast municipal fire station … like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’. Inevitably, some people agreed with him, others disagreed and the architectural practice which had designed the monstrous carbuncle lost the job and their business took a nosedive.

  A few years later, he was at it again, criticizing the planned development for Paternoster Square next to St Paul’s Cathedral. Following a competition, Charles had been invited to see the plans submitted by the seven finalists. He was appalled. Facing what he knew would be a hostile audience at the Mansion House he said, ‘You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.’ Richard Rogers, one of the finalists, described the Prince’s remarks as ‘very vicious – and very questionable democratically’, a charge that has repeatedly been made against Charles in the last twenty years by those who disagree with his views.

  ‘I believe I have been accused of setting myself up as a new undemocratic hurdle in the planning process,’ said the Prince of Wales, ‘a process we are supposed to leave to the professionals.’

  But the professionals have been doing it their way, thanks to the planning legislation, for the last forty years. We poor mortals are forced to live in the shadow of their achievements. Everywhere I go, it is one of the things people complain about most, and if there is one message I would like to deliver this evening, it is that large numbers of us in this country are fed up with being talked down to and dictated to by the existing planning, architectural and development establishment …

  Richard Rogers’s words rankled. ‘Sadly, in recent years,’ he told commentators, ‘our Royal Family have had a poor record as patrons of arts and sciences. As yet there is little to suggest that the Prince is an exception in this respect. As a man with strong views about architecture, a high public profile and enormous private wealth, he has an extraordinary opportunity to commission buildings for his large estates. But he has yet to produce a noteworthy construction …’

  As it happened the opportunity had already presented itself. In 1987 West Dorchester District Council had selected a four-hundred-acre plot of open farmland belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall to the west of the town for development to meet local housing needs. This was the second time the Council had commandeered Duchy land for expansion. The first development had been entirely conventional and the Duchy was again preparing plans for a conventional housing scheme for between two and three thousand dwellings on the second site when the Prince intervened and brought in the distinguished classical architect and urban planner Leon Krier as master planner. ‘Rather than see development of another zoned conventional housing estate with its accompanying separate industrial estate,’ he said, ‘I was determined to break the mould and to ensure that such growth should recapture the organic form and sense of place of our historic towns and villages.

  Poundbury represented a challenge to achieve this without compromising its unspoilt rural setting. It also presented the opportunity to build a community which included a wide range of housing intermingled with economic activity.’

  Poundbury has been a reality now for over ten years, yet it doesn’t feature on www.Streetfinder.co.uk, and although it is on my 2004 road map there is no road signage to it, not even off the Dorchester ring road just a few hundred yards away, so you can – as I did – sail straight past. I am sure this is not the intention but it all adds to the feeling of unreality when you arrive – as though you might be in a dream. It sounds clichéd to suggest it feels like a toy town – his enemies have been writing it off as a joke town from the start – but it does at first blush and even the locals in the old town refer to the buildings as Noddy houses.

  Poundbury seems altogether too perfect and the scale too small to be real. The streets are all perfectly named, and black iron signposts, the sort you find in the pedestrianized parts of historic towns, guide you to places such as the Middlemarsh Clinic, the Enterprise Centre and Pummery Square, the heart of the community with the Poet Laureate pub, the Octagon Café, a parade of little shops and the Brownsword Hall, that stands on chunky, honey-coloured pillars (a dead-ringer for the town hall in the Prince’s home town of Tetbury) – where all the clubs and societies meet. The houses might have been models made for a child’s play set. They are a hotchpotch of different designs and sizes but all have chimneys and tasteful front doors; they have lintels and bow windows, brick and sandstone, tiles, slates and gables, with not a telephone wire, aerial or satellite dish in sight, and not one with a car parked out front. Some are detached, others are terraced and at odd intervals there are fountains, water features and trees. I was looking for the Duchy development office – ‘just beyond Sunny Days nursery’ – and was being talked in on my mobile phone. I followed the roads I was told to follow and although I was horribly late and instinctively, therefore, inclined to hurry, I suddenly found myself driving at a snail’s pace. The road surface was uneven and mostly gravelled, it had no markings, no white lines or triangles, no indication of whose right of way it was at a junction, none of the signs that drivers are so familiar with and which allow us to drive on autopilot. As a result I felt uncertain and dropped my speed dramatically.

  This, I discovered, is all part of the plan, not, as I assumed, because the development was as yet unfinished; it is one of the major differences between Poundbury and other new housing estates built since the war. In rubbishing the development, the Prince’s critics tend to focus on the architecture, which is unashamedly traditional, and accuse him of being stuck in an earlier age. Simon Conibear, development manager for the project, urges me not to follow that line. That is the least important part of the experiment.

  What is interesting about Poundbury is that the design has created an instant community, and that is what the Prince was after: a development on a human scale that puts people before cars. It has a mixture of private and social housing in the same street, to prevent the formation of either rich enclaves or poor ghettos and a mixture of homes, offices and factories (including a chocolate factory that sells seconds at the back door) within the same area. And because garages and car parking areas are all in courtyards behind the houses, and walkways run between the buildings, the whole village is permeable, which makes it very user-friendly – but not so friendly, evidently, for burglars: crime levels are significantly lower than in any other part of Dorchester, and so far nothing more than petty. The streets are designed for pedestrians first and cars second, as I discovered. The result is that people can – and do – walk down the middle of roads in such safety that parents let their children walk to school and even five-year-olds go to the shops for their mothers. What Poundbury has done is to break the mould in which town planners and house builders have been stuck for the last fifty years, in which the car dominates everything; in doing so it has created – to hear the residents talk – a safe, friendly community that people are proud of and want to look after, where neighbours know one another and look out for one another.

  ‘The whole concept has worked remarkably well,’ says Kim Slowe, one of the developers, who now lives in one of his own houses in Poundbury,

  … and I admire the Prince for doing it. He put his neck on the line without question and it has genuinely wo
rked. If people move in Poundbury they move to another place in Poundbury, from house to flat maybe. That’s very telling. There’s no question it could have gone the other way, if the factories had created problems, if the highways – every single highway rule is broken because the planning officer was broadminded enough to listen to what was being explained to him and accept it. If he had changed and a by-the-book man had come to Poundbury, it would have been destroyed overnight. If someone had said ‘You’ve got to have bollards, yellow lines, and county-standard street lights’ it could have gone off the rails. If the social housing experiment had not worked it would have gone off the rails and would have turned very sour, very quickly.

  The developers have had to agree to work very closely to a highly prescriptive building code imposed by the Duchy of Cornwall that governs everything, from the materials and detail of the brickwork to the colour of doors and window frames and the positioning of house names.

  Although traditional on the outside and built from local materials in the local style, the houses in Poundbury are wholly contemporary in terms of energy efficiency and ecofriendliness. They all have double glazing – all wooden window frames, no plastic allowed – and some, like Kim Slowe’s, are ‘interjer’ houses with sheep’s wool for roof-space insulation and thermomax vacuum tube solar heating, heat recovery systems and grey water – too technical for me, but ground-breaking to those in the know, and all without using concrete and glass.

  Poundbury had a rough start. They began building Phase One in 1993. It was the middle of a recession, the media was taking potshots at the Prince of Wales over all sorts of issues and his private life was all over the newspapers; he was accused of wrecking the countryside, of getting special treatment to build on a greenfield site because of who he was. They got the mix between social and private housing wrong – too much social – and there were tensions. Social, owned by the Guinness Trust, a housing charity, and rented to council tenants at a fraction of the market value, now accounts for between 20 and 35 per cent – and it’s impossible to tell which it is. As one resident who takes round hundreds of visitors a year says, ‘I offer a pound for every one identified and I’ve never lost my pound.’

  Developers have always avoided mixing social and private housing for fear of depressing house prices; for the same reason, they have never put factories and commercial buildings alongside private housing. But the experience at Poundbury has turned that theory on its head; property prices are higher in Poundbury than on the executive estates or anywhere else in Dorchester. And with its mixed use, Poundbury fulfils all the government’s ideals of reducing journey times to work and being able to walk to schools and shops.

  But that didn’t happen overnight. It was five or six years before Phase One suddenly gelled and began to work and what emerged was a highly bonded community, where everyone spoke to everyone else no matter which front door they emerged from. ‘People identified with it and liked the architecture,’ says Simon Conibear.

  Then you got the Market Square and the Octagon Café which became a social venue; we procured a Farmers’ Market here in the square, bought covered umbrellas – that cost us £3000. I used to have to get up at 6.00 a.m. on a Saturday to put them up, then gradually residents took over and they now do it. Local organic producers came round and created a little fair in the square, then a musician, a fiddler, and suddenly these vital little human ingredients were showing that this experiment of creating a place based on the human scale, providing what people really wanted and not what was imposed by planners and plc house builders was actually beginning to work. There are later milestones, like the opening of the pub. All major brewers said it won’t work, too small a catchment, not standard format, the Daily Mirror was running a long story saying no one wants the Prince’s pub. Then someone took it and it worked and met its annual financial targets within six months. Will Hadlow is the youngest publican in England. It’s a thriving business.

  One reason the pub has worked is because it’s a mixeduse environment – one of the principles of Poundbury – what towns and villages that grew organically used to be. It’s not a housing estate or residential suburb. With all these employers there are now six hundred people working in Poundbury and 750 people living here. Business people use the pub at lunchtime, residents in the evening – double whammy. It’s the same with village stores which opened six months after the pub. Tesco Metro turned it down, everyone said it wouldn’t work, wouldn’t trade. But it’s busy. Private individuals took it, Budgens are their franchisers, so 80 per cent is Budgens and the rest they select themselves, some of it is Duchy stuff. They now want to open another. It has disproved the major retailers.

  Poundbury is about disproving shibboleths that have confounded good design for the last fifty years, it has confounded the national house builders’ precept that people want detached little boxes all looking the same round a cul-de-sac. Prince Charles deserves a lot of credit for sticking with these ideas through a lot of criticism.

  Critics are still sneering at Poundbury – mostly people who haven’t been to see it – but it has had a major impact on planning in this country. Poundbury is listed in PPG3 (Planning Policy Guidance Note 3, to you and me) and council engineers, traffic experts, highways officials, architects, developers and planners – great coach loads of people in the urban development business – come from all over to see this model of urban planning which, without the Prince of Wales, would never have happened.

  Despite an absence of street furniture, white lines or stop signs, there has not been a single casualty on the roads in ten years. ‘The Prince didn’t dream all of this up in the bath,’ says Simon Conibear.

  He was extremely well advised by people in the know. That’s the great advantage of his position, he can take advice, have a lunch at Highgrove and call in the top people and ask questions. He spoke to a highways engineer called Alan Baxter who has done things round the Tower of London and Trafalgar Square; he says don’t look at roads as things for cars to get round, think of them as spaces between buildings, public space. This myopic view that says ‘get the highway book out – 7.2-metre highway, 2.8-metre footways on either side, then do your houses’ – has been so wrong and so damaging for Britain in the last fifty years and you needed someone like the Prince to challenge those standards and stand up and say some things and stick by those people who were saying those things. I doubt whether we would have had the success in challenging the highways and planning authorities without the Prince. The fact that he was fronting the challenge made them sit up and listen and work to make it work, particularly on highways.

  Some might call that an abuse of power; but if the Prince of Wales hadn’t stood up and challenged the planners, it’s possible that no one would ever have done so, and the remorseless march of identical, soulless housing estates across Britain’s green fields would have continued with no thought about the community needs and the welfare of the people who were buying them. Financially he would have been much better off if he had kept his nose out of it. As Duke of Cornwall, he gets the revenue from the Duchy – that’s what keeps him in his very comfortable lifestyle and the Duchy would almost certainly have got more money for the land if they had sold it to a mass developer who would have built eight thousand boxes.

  He put his head on the block for something he believed might make a difference to the quality of people’s lives – and it certainly seems to have done so. It could have gone badly wrong and it is still early days. Not much more than 15 per cent of the whole project has been completed and it is not scheduled to be finished before 2020. But John Prescott, First Secretary of State, is a big fan, has visited several times, and Poundbury is being seen and promoted by government as a blueprint for the future.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Community Spirit

  His experiment at Poundbury is by no means the first time the Prince of Wales has had an influence on government. The Department of Work and Pensions New Deal for getting the unemployed back into
work is straight out of the Prince’s Trust and the work they have been doing for nearly thirty years; the only difference is that the government’s scheme is doomed to failure. It provides money to encourage employers to recruit the long-term unemployed; it doesn’t provide the back-up, the practical help, the mentoring, the team building that the Prince’s Trust provides – essential in giving real help to young people who lack motivation – with the result that most of those who have been given employment under the New Deal don’t turn up on time, don’t have the right attitude and have been swiftly sacked. The government’s Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative is another example; this is pure Business in the Community – and in this instance pure Prince of Wales.

  The Prince didn’t found Business in the Community (BITC). It was started by Stephen O’Brien in the early eighties with a simple idea for inner-city regeneration: to involve companies in the communities in which they operate. If you can persuade business to invest, train and recruit from within those communities then you solve unemployment and improve the whole depressed inner-city environment. O’Brien, aware of the Prince’s Trust’s work in that area, initially asked the Prince for support with a project called Fullemploy, to help unemployed young black people in the inner cities. What followed was a daring event known as the Windsor Conference. For two days the chairmen of sixty major companies in the UK were shut up with a crowd of articulate black people. Racism, the Prince told the assembled gathering, was a failure by the white community to recognize the potential of the black community. It was a brave thing to do, it could have backfired; instead it was widely regarded as one of the most significant advances ever made in race relations, and which people involved in the field still talk about today. Charles felt he had found a man who shared the same ideals and an organization where he could make a difference. He became President a year later and has been passionately and inextricably bound up with the organization ever since – personally initiating several major programmes. Like the Prince’s Trust, BITC is a huge success story. It turns over £22 million, employs four hundred people and has seven hundred member companies – one in five of the private sector workforce and three-quarters of FTSE one hundred companies.