Cars in my front yard: not in my back yard.
The below is a clip from a late-80s TV programme, in which Prince Charles laments the fate of London's once-beautiful skyline at the hands of post-war (re)building. It's filmed on a grey day, and the backdrop looks drab, even if the viewer isn't really able to pick out much in particular. 'Can you imagine the French doing this sort of thing in Paris?' The taunt is thoughtfully chosen to reopen the unhealable English wound: the fear of being inferior to Foreigners. Charlie foments NIMBY fury, and immediately proposes a palliative scapegoat - any and all modern architecture.
HRH Chaz is very much a fan of old (or old-looking, anyway) buildings. He elsewhere described a proposed extension of the National Gallery as a 'monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend'. Regardless the architectural merits of the extension (which isn't the one that got built), to call the lumbering stodge of the National Gallery 'elegant' is simply inane. Its greatest rival for London's Most Insipid Neoclassical Wank is, sadly for us all, Buckingham Palace.
In the vid above, His Chazness decries Birmingham's (once new; now old; doomed) Central Library as looking 'like a place where books are incinerated, not kept'. But what should a library look like? What unmistakable cultural symbol or language clearly announces a building's purpose? Should a library looks like a giant book? Or be entirely clad with books? Or have a large enough sign proclaiming LIBRARY to be totally unambiguous? (Perhaps this precise line of thinking lead to FAT's snazzy extension to Thornton Heath library, which does indeed sport such clarity, in a rather superbly OTT way).
Thornton Heath = happy Charlie
In response to the horrors of the Twentieth Century (somewhere along the lines, I think Charles is eliding Harlow into the Holocaust), Chaz allowed an 'unashamedly traditional' sort-of New Town to be built on his lands, just to the west of humdrum Dorchester. Poundbury: an idealised mock-Georgian 'urban quarter', a sort-of English Amish wonderland in which time stopped a couple of hundred years ago.
At first, Poundbury seems rather fun. Swinging off the A35, the eye is caught by the Fire Station HQ, shaped like a Georgian version of a Greek temple. And the drill tower is in the Venetian sytlee. Tee hee! How very silly. But surely, Chaz, a fire station should be in the shape of a flame. Or some water.
Only replica Georgiana is permitted. There are no painted road markings, no traffic lights, few signs, and a uniform set of 'period' streetlamps. Disabled parking bays are designated by white stones set in the brickwork, like pixelated icon art from the 8-bit 1800s.
What becomes clear, however, is that Poundbury is not fun. It may look like Chessington World of Adventures, but Poundbury takes itself very, very seriously. There's a sterilised, totalitarian approach to everything. It's clearly ridiculous, and yet no-one seems to be admitting it. The experience is rather uncomfortable, like watching straight-faced slapstick: it's unclear whether those involved find it painful, so you cannot tell whether to laugh or be concerned.
And it goes on. Streets and streets of particoloured brick-and-render, punctuated with bigger set-piece bits of silliness. That's not to say it can't be attractive. Georgian stuff is like toast: warm, reassuring, unthreatening, occasionally just what you want.
But the design is stupid. It does not seek to address a sadly unavoidable lifestyle choice of those dwellers wealthy enough to live in Poundbury - an addiction to cars. Dorchester train station is an unlikely 25-minute slog away, and that apocryphal Thatcher quotation equating bus-taking with failure still rings loudly in the ears of the conservative Dorest.
Poundbury has not tried to learn from the efforts of post-war planners to deal with this ingrained reliance on private transport. Croydon, Birmingham, Coventry and a thousand other towns are all vilified for trying. So, Poundbury goes into denial. Cars are a modern problem; Poundbury is not modern, so there cannot be a problem. At least Quinlan Terry's hallucination at Richmond Riveside has underground parking for all the mock-Georgian offices above.
But there are cars in Poundbury. Cars parked on the street everywhere. There are some efforts to hide these, but the Georgians only had stable blocks, not garages or - heavens forfend - multistorey car parks. And so Poundbury becomes trapped in its own Luddite rhetoric, and cannot permit any solution other than large, dead, confused spaces, such as the car park / main square / void outside Waitrose.
The natural bricolage of place [I'm channeling Jonathan Meades here], usually driven by history and economics and random whim, here comes baked-in. Artificial echoes of bricked-up windows are included in Poundbury new-builds because there was once a window tax in England. Who in C21 England would deliberately want less light in their house? Is there another equation of generous fenestration with the unacceptable post-war hopefulness of Modernism? Had FAT built a mock-Georgian home for a banker client and included bricked-up windows, it would be a joke (possibly at the expense of the client...). But I think those who chose to live in Poundbury are too traumatised by the Daily Mail's headlines about immigration to smile.
The below, cropped from the Rightmove world in which the sky is always blue, shows an end-of-terrace that comes ready-made with an 'extension' and a 'loft conversion'. The house pastiches age at the expense of practicality (say, the ability to stand up properly in the top floor, or storage space in the loft). A fantasy heritage that is just as silly, and just as po-faced, as designer jeans that come ready-ripped.
Wandering around, I thought a few touches of Modernism had somehow sneaked under the eugenic radar. But on reflection, Poundbury has not admitted real plurality, but rather appropriated and rewritten this unwanted aspect of history.
This result is a genetically re-engineered Modernism, a mutant form of the movement that remained centripetally drawn to the past. A fantasy in which Corbusier limited himself to four piloti, and recognised that any building without a coaching lamp is dangerously subversive.
And it just stops. Incomplete Poundbury becomes hinterland. There's a creepy, quasi-apocalyptic nothingness, a moat of wilderness around the town. Which is, quite plausibly, deliberate.
Perhaps most, it's the picking-and-choosing irritates me. If you want to live in a Georgian world, you should have to do it properly. Cars should be banned, thereby making the place far more picturesque (happy now?). Horse-drawn cart to the office in London should only take a couple of days. Maybe too the water should be enriched with cholera. And maybe the air perfumed by some giant tuberculosis nebuliser. And the majority of residents should be employed as bell-boys and cooks and skivvies, rather than as self-appointed lords and ladies of their manor / new-build flat.
It terrifies me that the next King of England thinks that so much progress over the last two hundred years has been entirely a bad thing, a Dark Age of artless failure, best to be eradicated from the records. This does not bode well for the future.
Poundbury is the scariest place I have ever been.
Prefab chimneys: your argument is invalid
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