King Charles’s Vision of Britain, Writ Small
For decades, the King has overseen a planned community, Poundbury, to reflect the best of the United Kingdom’s past. What might it tell us about the future?
By Anna Russell The New Yorker
“I was determined that this should not be yet another soulless housing estate with a business park tacked on,” Charles has written.
In 1988, beset by marital troubles, King Charles III, then Prince Charles, starred in a BBC documentary subtitled “A Vision of Britain.” From a boat cruising down the Thames, he gestured toward the passing cityscape. “All around me is what used to be one of the architectural wonders of the world,” he said. He was wearing a dark suit, buttoned, with a pocket square, and speaking slowly. After the Great Fire, London evolved over three centuries, he said; then conflict, and bombings, came. “What was rebuilt after the war has succeeded in wrecking London’s skyline,” he continued, “and obliterating the view of St. Paul’s in a jostling scrum of skyscrapers all competing for attention.” The camera panned over the City of London—the oldest part of the city—catching several construction cranes. “Can you imagine the French doing this sort of thing in Paris?” Charles asked, incredulously.
The documentary and an accompanying book laid out the Prince’s views on modernist architecture. Plainly, he hated it. It stank. Turning his attention to Birmingham, he described designs for a new convention center. “I’m not against development, but I must confess I felt terribly demoralized when I went there to see the plans last year,” he confided. “Choosing my words to be as inoffensive as possible, I said I thought it was an unmitigated disaster.” Guffaw! Of the city’s central library, he said, “It looks like a place where books are incinerated, not kept.” Concrete towers were blights on the landscape, favoring cars and technology above humans. “When did we lose our sense of vision?” he asked. “There is no need for buildings, just because they house computers and word processors, to look like machines themselves.”
When “A Vision of Britain,” the book, was released in 1989, it became a best-seller, and launched an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Many of London’s architects were understandably peeved. Britain’s population was expanding; the need for new construction was obvious. “You cannot put the clock back,” Colin St. John Wilson, head of the architecture department at Cambridge University, and designer of the British Library, which the Prince hated, remarked at the time. As Sally Bedell Smith writes, in her exacting biography, from 2017, “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life,” “Charles’s failure to see beyond the purity of his aesthetic was a blind spot. In part because he was not subjected to the challenges of ordinary living, he didn’t understand the need for urban density to keep housing costs affordable.” His love for low-rise buildings resulted in a “lifelong antipathy to skyscrapers, whatever their merits.”
In her long lifetime, Charles’s mother, the Queen, hardly ever expressed a strong opinion. A vocal antipathy toward skyscrapers? She would never. Earlier this month, making his first address to the nation as King, Charles acknowledged the deference his new role would require. (Monarchs are discouraged from most passion projects.) “My life will of course change as I take up my new responsibilities,” he said. “It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply. But I know this important work will go on in the trusted hands of others.” It remains to be seen whether he will be able to fully step back from his favorite causes, which also include climate change and alternative medicine. In architecture, at least, he has left plenty behind that betrays his true feelings. The greatest expression of Charles’s vision for Britain might be found in Poundbury, a small, purpose-built community on four hundred acres on the outskirts of Dorchester, in Dorset, near England’s southwest coast—a project he has overseen with meticulous attention to detail.
In Poundbury, there are no skyscrapers. The buildings are short and built in a mishmash of traditionalist styles: Georgian, classical, Italian villa, country cottage. There seem to be no traffic signs or road markings, and almost no public trash cans. Built on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, the $1.4-billion estate that Charles oversaw before he became King, Poundbury has been crafted to meet Charles’s aesthetic standards. (The Duchy and its holdings, including Poundbury, have now passed to Prince William.) Like Seaside, Florida, the immaculate resort town that served as the set for “The Truman Show,” from which Poundbury reportedly drew inspiration, it is startlingly clean. When I visited recently, I carried a glass bottle around for hours before finding a place to off-load it. Long before Charles ascended to the throne, he had his own fiefdom. In Poundbury, Charles was already King.
What would you make if you could build your own town? Or, put another way, what would a town version of you look like? If you are King Charles III, it looks like Poundbury. As an extension of Dorchester, an ancient market town that dates back to Roman times, Poundbury does not have its own train station. Stepping off in Dorchester, I found a PizzaExpress, a Nando’s, and an Odeon movie theatre—chains you might find on any British high street. Following a road through a residential neighborhood, I passed rows of standard brick houses with little gardens. Somewhere along the way, I noticed the streets growing cleaner, the grass turning greener. The buildings seemed freshly scrubbed. Above a series of placards for housing developers, a sign read “Duchy of Cornwall,” and, in large silver letters, “Poundbury.”
Before Poundbury was built, it was mainly open fields. In the late eighties, when the local planning authority decided to expand Dorchester, Charles took an active role. He hired the Luxembourgian architect Léon Krier, who disliked modern architecture as much as he did, to design a master plan for the village. Krier was a proponent of New Urbanism, which argued that cities should be designed around pedestrians—they should be walkable, and mixed-use, with businesses mingling with residential housing. (Krier built a home in Seaside, Florida.) They should not be allowed to sprawl unchecked. “I was determined that this should not be yet another soulless housing estate with a business park tacked on,” Charles has written, “as has happened to so many of the towns and cities throughout the country.”
Construction began in 1993, with architects following a strict “building code” that promotes the “use of traditional materials and regulates building form and street scenes.” The Duchy ran a tight ship. “The Duchy’s Poundbury team work closely with the developers to control design and build quality,” the community’s Web site reads. When residents move to Poundbury, they agree to a series of stipulations laid out in a design-and-community code. The “do’s and don’ts” of Poundbury “will help to ensure that the architectural harmony of Poundbury is not disfigured by the type of insensitive alterations which have occurred elsewhere,” it reads. The comment is accompanied by an illustration of two houses—one that follows the code, and one that doesn’t—meant to show “what might happen in the absence of restraint and concern for the overall character.” The model home looks clean and orderly, if a little sterile. The offending house has added window boxes, skylights, a satellite dish, and little potted plants. An ornate glass conservatory peeks out the back. It looked, to my eyes, like someone lived there.
In the British press, Poundbury has long been a source of amusement. It has been called a “feudal Disneyland,” and “fake, heartless, authoritarian, and grimly cute.” “Why should we hide behind the delusion that excellence only existed in the past and the best we can do is to ape it?” Stephen Bayley wrote in the Guardian in 2008. Lately, coverage has been more kind. A Guardian article from 2016 was titled, “A Royal Revolution: Is Prince Charles’s Model Village Having the Last Laugh?” Today, Poundbury is home to around forty-six hundred residents, and employs some twenty-four hundred people. Since its inception, it has been under construction. The goal is to finish with twenty-seven hundred homes by 2026. Then, Poundbury will be complete.
When I called Blake Holt, head of the Poundbury Residents Association, he told me that most residents were happy with the stipulations. “Certainly for people who live here, they love living here,” he said. He was speaking to me from a boat off the Dorset coast. “In general, I think people who choose to move to Poundbury also buy into the whole ethos of Poundbury.” Sure, there were minor grumbles. Some residents wanted to replace the timber windows on their houses—required by the code—with lower-maintenance PVC windows. (Following a review of the stipulations, their request was denied by the Duchy.) Recently, a neighbor of Holt’s had been asked to reduce the number of potted plants outside her front door. (“The Duchy got involved,” Holt said, though he added, “the matter was resolved amicably.”) For the most part, the requirements “are not arduous at all,” he said. If you wanted to repaint your front door, you simply needed to consult the palette of colors approved by Poundbury’s architects. (“As simple as that.”) When I asked Holt how he would define the ethos of Poundbury, he said it was about integration—about a third of housing is low-cost—and good design. “Does good architecture and design have a positive effect on people’s well-being? In my opinion, the answer to that is yes,” he said. “If you step out your front door and look around and everything looks great, and well-defined, and attractive, then that’s going to make you feel a bit better, hopefully.”
The first place I visited at Poundbury was Queen Mother Square. Everyone else seemed to be there, too. Officially opened by the Queen in 2016, its centerpiece is a grand plinth bearing a statue of the Queen Mother, Charles’s grandmother, in a feathered hat. On the day I arrived, the base was covered in flower tributes to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s passing. Lining the square are some of Poundbury’s most imposing buildings. There’s the butter-yellow Strathmore House, a wide, classical building with columns, filled with luxury flats, and one of two local pubs, the Duchess of Cornwall—named for Camilla. The Royal Pavilion, completed in 2019, is even more ornate, with swooping arches and a soaring tower, complete with a cupola. A curious feature of Poundbury is its lack of definition between the road and pedestrian spaces: in some areas, there were no sidewalks, and I often found myself accidentally walking in the street; also, the square itself was full of parked cars.
It was a sunny day, and the Duchess of Cornwall was busy with people drinking at tables set up outside. Around the back of Strathmore House, the Corinthian columns were painted onto the building’s façade. The shadows were convincing. I wandered into a butcher’s shop that offered beeswax candles and rows of plastic-free goods. Rob Owen, a butcher who commutes from Dorchester, told me that the meat and produce was sourced locally. “King Charles now—as we know him—it was part of his mission. He’s always talking about climate change and so on and so forth,” he said. Owen said he liked the different architecture styles in Poundbury, and the community spirit of the place. “Everyone says hello, everyone’s got time to talk.” Did people in Dorchester think Poundbury was weird? “It’s marmite,” he said, “So you either love it or hate it.”
In a slightly older part of Poundbury, I found the Buttercross, a brick, gazebo-like building with soaring ceilings and another cupola. It houses a coffee shop. In a nearby courtyard, there were charging stations for electric vehicles. Houses had built-in bird boxes. Outside of a pilates studio that seemed to blend seamlessly into the building façade behind it, I met Charmian Wylde, an acupuncturist who had recently bought a second home in Poundbury. Wylde had lived in Dorset in the nineteen-eighties, before Poundbury existed. “Initially, we were very cynical,” she told me. “But I have had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree shift.” She described the cafés (“the best coffee in Dorset”) and the friendly atmosphere (“the people smile, the children smile”). “You feel you are in a way going back to some of the best qualities that the U.K. has had,” she said.
A woman named Barbara Proctor asked if I’d like a tour of her home. Proctor moved to town after setting up Partners in Design, an interior-design company, in Poundbury in 2019. She lives in a semi-detached three-story Georgian-inspired house, with a landscaped garden and a home gym. “I never thought I’d live in a new build,” she told me. But she was taken by the high ceilings and the arched windows. “The way the light plays is stunning,” she said. Proctor’s not great with rules, but she had made her peace with Poundbury’s code. “You have to be aware that when you come in here there are certain things you’re going to have to accept,” she said. At the top of a set of stairs in Proctor’s garden, I looked over at the neighboring gardens, each personalized within identical wooden fences. The shared building—the exterior of the attached houses—was immaculate, the window frames all the exact same shade of white. There were no satellite dishes. It looked just like the drawing in the handbook.
As I talked to the residents of Poundbury, nearly everyone told me of a time they had seen Charles, or met him in person. He had passed through their shop, or opened a playground, or cut a ribbon, or said hello in the street. “It’s pretty strong on the monarchy front, for obvious reasons,” Proctor said. I detected a slight worry that Poundbury would not be the same without Charles at the helm. “I’m sure the developers must be very, very sad,” Proctor said.“I genuinely don’t think William will necessarily have the time or the inclination, because it’s not his passion.” Walking the streets, I kept arriving at the edge of the community. The perfect houses would abruptly end, and there would be a building site, or simply an open field. It felt like reaching the limits of a stage set.
In conversations, many people had mentioned the new playground on the Great Field, a vast open space between Poundbury and Dorchester proper, where residents gather to chat and walk their dogs. (“Playground ‘Fit for a Future King’ Being Built in Prince Charles’ Model Town,” a Dorset Live article announced, adding, hopefully, “Princes George, Louis and Princess Charlotte will want first dibs on this.”) When I arrived, I was surprised to discover that the wooden play structure was a quasi-replica of Poundbury, complete with a smaller version of the gazebo-like Buttercross building, topped by its own miniature cupola. An adult chased a child over a bridge attached to the tiny Buttercross. On the field, the sun was setting and teen-agers were playing soccer on the grass. A pristine gravel path wound through the park. It was idyllic and artificial at the same time. Everyone seemed utterly at ease.
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