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Prince Charles reasserts need for traditional design principles
In a passionate speech to American and British New Urbanists, Prince Charles declared Sept. 17 that his attempt to reintroduce traditional design principles in the United Kingdom is achieving significant progress. Poundbury, the mixed-use community the prince is developing in Dorset, has attained financial and popular success. The Labor government of Tony Blair is paying close attention to the traditional planning ideas advocated by Charles and by urbanists in the US and Europe. Meanwhile, many of the criticisms that were directed against the prince’s ideas in the 1980s and 1990s are being proven wrong.
The Prince of Wales, who will turn 56 on Nov. 14, described himself as a man who fights for his beliefs in the face of opposition. “All I try to do is stick by my guns when others are trying to stop me,” he told a gathering at Highgrove, his country estate in Gloucestershire. The gathering, which included 60 Americans, 10 Britons, two Canadians, and one Italian, was assembled by the Seaside Pienza Institute, a nonprofit organization founded by Seaside developer Robert Davis, Ray Gindroz of Pittsburgh-based Urban Design Associates, and the European architect and theorist Leon Krier.
The prince has pursued a far-ranging set of social, environmental, and aesthetic objectives in recent years, convinced that valuable older attitudes and practices must be restored. “I wanted to find ways of healing the landscape, healing the soil, healing the ravages of the architecture…healing the situation in education,” the prince observed. “So many timeless principles have been totally erased.”
When the prince began making an issue of what he saw as soulless or downright ugly contemporary architecture in the 1980s, “I was met with a wall of unbelievable opposition and ridicule,” he said. He decided his most effective response would be “to create models on the ground.” Thus, in 1988 he asked Krier to prepare a master plan for Poundbury (see in-depth story on page 5), a 400-acre extension of the old town of Dorchester, in southwest England. The following year, Charles presented his 10 key principles of development — beginning with “place” and concluding with “community” — in his book A Vision of Britain.
The goal at Poundbury was a place where people of varying ages and incomes could live, work, and fulfill their daily needs — a place that would have factories, stores, medical facilities, public spaces, and a variety of housing, all within walking distance. “Traditional towns were equipped to deal in differences without losing harmony,” he told the Seaside Pienza group, which met for four days of touring and discussion in Poundbury, Bath, and the Belgravia section of London. The ability to pull the disparate elements of a community together harmoniously is “a question of good manners, consideration for others,” the prince said. He added, “I’ve always felt good manners were very important…. Bath, Belgravia, and Poundbury are examples of good manners to the public. That has been thrown out the window, and I want to bring it back.”
Early criticism
In the early years, the plans for Poundbury sparked much criticism. According to Charles, the British architecture critic Jonathan Glancey said “no working-class types would be welcomed there.” That has not turned out to be the case, according to the prince. About a fifth of the living units are “social housing,” the British term for publicly subsidized housing.
“The media like to present Poundbury as an expression of princely power,” Charles told the group, which included developers, designers, academics, government officials, and leaders of nonprofit organizations. He insisted that the opposite is true: “The tools we chose to craft these towns are tools anyone can use …. More and more people are coming to appreciate the results.”
In May 2003, the London Telegraph reported that the Duchy of Cornwall — the 138,000-acre estate from which the prince gets most of his income — has done well through shrewd property investments such as Poundbury. “Originally, building land at Poundbury was sold at £40,000 an acre,” the Telegraph reported. “It is now selling for more than £350,000 [$631,000] an acre.” In his speech, Charles noted that Poundbury is “the best-performing value the Duchy of Cornwall has.”
Among those who have looked favorably at Poundbury for planning and design techniques is Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. “Traditional values in a modern setting, that’s my slogan,” Prescott told the Seaside Pienza group during a reception in London. The deputy prime minister, who comes across as the embodiment of working-class England, praised the prince’s accomplishments at Poundbury, though he said it may be impossible to use Poundbury’s building methods everywhere, given the scarcity of traditional craftspeople.
Charles, although a strong admirer of traditional craftsmanship, seems open to a degree of industrialization of housing production — especially at a time when Britain needs to build quickly to counteract the enormous escalation in housing costs over the past several years. “If Bath and Belgravia teach anything,” the prince said, “it is that there is no reason fast-track cannot be used to produce ‘slow cities.’ ” He indicated that the government’s interest in design codes is an encouraging sign, and could help to assure quality in whatever is built. The BBC reported in early September that the average residential property in Britain costs £153,743 ($276,000).
The Prince’s Foundation, a philanthropic education organization of Prince Charles’s, has been supplying some of the ideas for the Deputy Prime Minister’s housing program, which aims to produce 1.5 million dwellings in about 15 years. Staff members of the Prince’s Foundation include Michael Mehaffy, formerly project director for the Orenco Station development in Hillsboro, Oregon; Melissa Saunders, an American new urbanist; and Paul Murrain, a British architect who has worked in the US. “Many of the techniques you [American new urbanists] employ are relevant here,” David Lunts, director of urban policy for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, told New Urban News.
Portion of Prince Charles’s Poundbury plan, courtesy of the Duchy of Cornwall
