Prince Charming?

With a good deal of bravery, Prince Charles put his money where his mouth is and organised the development of Poundbury on the fringes of Dorchester, one of England's finest country towns and model of Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge. John Walker, Chairman of Dorchester Civic Society's Conservation Group assesses the experiment's aims and results and finds both lacking in vision.

For good or ill, because of the Prince's involvement, all comment on Dorchester's architecture is inevitably linked by the news media to the Duchy development, and perhaps rightly so since the same local authorities are involved in both. Hence the hollowness of the planners' response to one seemed to expose the hollowness in the execution of the other. Pastiche-adulation has taken such a hold that local planners now denigrate genuine historic buildings as eyesores and advocate their replacement with woeful, ersatz versions as 'practical' alternatives. Genuine historic Dorchester seems in danger of becoming theme park Casterbridge.

It seemed to me that the Prince's 'monstrous carbuncle' speech had reflected exactly what was happening in Dorchester and had pointed the way to a change of thinking as to how urban building styles ought to relate to the inherited townscape. Extending this theory into a wider context that included marrying buildings to landscape and its application to humbler structures marked a further advance. Together with the precepts advocated in A Vision of Britain these seemed to me to predicate a return to what might be described as vernacular craftsman's values.

Non-industrialised communities were compelled to use the resources available in the immediate environment because no others could be procured at less than unacceptable cost (and also perhaps because their importation resulted in no perceptible benefit). Hence expertise in handling local materials to meet local needs was built up over many generations, perhaps even millennia, and resulted in regional variations still observable today. This deep-rooted tradition of craftsmanlike, straightforward and honest use of materials coupled with an intimate knowledge of their various natures and properties resulted in manufactures which Bernard Leach aptly described as having been 'born not made'. All this was achieved without the necessity of having recourse to a professional designer who was, until our own day, a phenomenon associated with the moneyed and leisured classes since only they could afford artefacts the appearances of which were dictated not by pragmatism, but by fashion. Many people today regard the Unconscious beauty, obtained by the everyday objects produced by vernacular craftsmen, a beauty born of necessity, as being of a higher order than ever that attained by the contrivances of modern machinofacture.

Not until our own generation were the last vestiges of these age-old traditional crafts finally swamped by and drowned in the sea of mass market goods and hence the unbroken cord linking us to our most remote ancestors finally severed. Long before this final rupture some, such as William Morris, were inveighing against the seemingly all-pervasive industrial products and advocating the preservation of the spirit of the folk tradition. Attempting to effect the reconnection of the cut and frayed ends of the cord that linked us to this tradition has been the worthy aim of many others into our own day. By doing so they would wish to put back the humanity lost from so much of that with which we crowd our daily lives. It is important to realise that such people, now for the most part individual craftsmen and artists, work outside the mainstream of community life, quite unlike the traditional craftsman who had unwittingly the strength of an inbuilt inherited knowledge of 'the correct way' to do the job in hand to support him in his unremitting daily toil. His nearest contemporary equivalent is perhaps the baker of good bread who works unselfconsciously in a determined process which yet results in a product subtly different from those of his peers. Neither he nor the craftsman of old, while expecting due recognition of their mastery of their craft and perhaps enjoying a local reputation, would expect to be celebrated as someone of remarkable ability but as justly deserving the approbation of their fellows for their honest toil.

As a consequence of our being inheritors of a craft tradition broken by industrialisation, attaining a valid late twentieth-century vernacular style is a task of immense complexity and the route to such attainment is set by pitfalls and blind alleys: the exact opposite of conditions under which the craftsman of the past operated. Accepting the standards which were second nature to our forebears, that is the use of materials in straightforward ways appropriate to their innate qualities without egotistical striving for effect, is simple compared with the problem of deciding what form an object produced to such specifications should take to be a genuine expression of them for our own times.

The most common manifestations of an inability to cope with these difficulties are evident in attempts to copy the artefacts of previous generations. Failure to assimilate the basic tenets of folk craft practices results in tasteless pastiche of the external appearance of objects and buildings or hideous travesties in tortured materials as exemplified in much handmade furniture and ceramics or so-called traditional buildings to which 'period' detail is tacked as an afterthought. These are the inevitable results when appearance is put before substance.

The simple fact is that the objects of the past, however much loved, cannot be recreated and any attempt to do so is doomed to failure. The constellation of conditions that determines the appearance of artefacts is in constant flux and each generation has added or relinquished features. Hence details change over time. So also does each generation's perception of the past and fakes are inevitably unmasked by Time. To attempt the reproduction of historical artefacts is an endeavour reserved for the maker of museum displays; for the working craftsman or architect to do so merely reveals a bankruptcy of inventive talent. Pastiche building is a very different thing from drawing inspiration from the past, accepting its standards, limitations and sensitivities and then using them in the creation of a genuine modern expression.

This is where the Duchy development goes woefully astray. Although the standards of the past are in large part encompassed by the Mosaic imperatives listed as Poundbury philosophy, in practice these have not been put into effect and hence the results are unblessed. The mute testimony of the buildings is of the attempted recreation of everything from a late-medieval Cotswold market house to curious Dickensian shopfronts. The buildings are ludicrous and the quality bathetic where sound walls are 'supported' by hollow 'buttresses' and steel lintels masquerade behind thin boards as solid oaken lintels while fake nineteenth-century street lights perch on fake eighteenth-century cottages. Where in this 'celebration of the locality' is the cob, the clunch, the flint and the thatch? One suspects these materials were put in the too-difficult file as compared with the ease of utilising insulation blocks and cement render. If the intention was to produce poetry in the Dorset dialect, the result so far is doggerel in theatrical Mummerset.

This would not be so bad were the results confined to this suburban development but, as mentioned above, a bastardised version of the Duchy development's style has gained a stranglehold on local authority thinking and is affecting planning decisions elsewhere. The resulting mongrel constructions must be seen to be believed and reveal the depths to be plumbed once 'Poundbury style' is unleashed without the restraining hand of the Duchy working to some small extent as a brake on the half-baked ideas of the aesthetically-challenged. The modern, unreformed, housing estate may not be everyone's ideal environment but at least its honest mediocrity frees it from the intrusion of hideous, joke-historical monstrosities advocated as being an improved alternative. Also it is germane to note that the public, voting with its wallet, has not been backward in buying into the denigrated Fordington Fields.

The Prince's admirable expressed aim seemed to be to serve out honest weight and measure in a time of dearth. Clearly that something has gone as badly wrong as the built environment at Poundbury shows his aspirations to have been undermined and a marvellous opportunity to forge a new model environment is slipping away. The intention was to reduce the impact of the all-pervading culture of the car but anyone coming to Poundbury to cultivate his garden will discover more designated parking spaces than vegetable patches. The Duchy's own brochure is unwittingly eloquent on this point: the plan of 'Phase 1' of the development reveals the relative spaciousness of the housing plots on the neighbouring council estate compared with the hugger-mugger density of the new buildings.

Again the development was supposed to respect the landscape but what is to be made of the planned obliteration of one of our oldest topographical features, the Durnovaria/Isca road and the desecration of unimproved downland near Pummery? The much vaunted quality of detailing is in fact rarely to be found: doorcases, railings and other fittings can all be found down to the same basic standard as on any other estate and to the tweeness of 'olde worlde' features the lunacy in the blind windows is testator.

A rather larger moonbeam is to be found in the 'enterprise centre'. Quite why this building was constructed on this site is unexplained but, whatever the reason, the edifice is a good example of poor fit between design and purpose. Despite its prison-like western elevation, complete with what appear to be embrasures for ordnance, the eastern reveals it to be pastiche parish union workhouse, circa 1840, plus functionless gatepiers which stand grandiose but forlornly gateless cluttering the access. This forbidding building is perhaps the worst 'uglification' yet of the ancient landscape of this site. The overall layout is being altered in response to commercial pressure and this has resulted in some unhappy new features. The predilection of the car owner to park the vehicle within the curtilage of his property has led to some areas where the needs of the machine are dictating the streetscape. The result has been the creation of somewhat dead areas and when coupled with the well-intentioned alleyways seems to presage a footpad's paradise.

Where on this site can be found a building that is not merely developers"Georgian style' with knobs on? The structures range from the banal to the bizarre but all fall within this general term of reference. The social engineering and improved layout heralded in the original scheme have been quickly subsumed and undermined by this failure to deliver anything that is demonstrably better than the run of the mill housing estate.

If this analysis is accepted as valid then there seem to be two ways forward which would absolve the Prince and the Duchy from further criticism. The first would be to admit frankly that the development is purely 'commercial'. The trite pastiche architecture could then be excused as being a salesman's conception of 'what the consumer likes' and the high ideals of the Poundbury philosophy can then be sidelined and compromised into oblivion. This course would have the advantage of total honesty without requiring any change of habit but would also be a tacit admission of failure; new Poundbury is but old Fordington Fields writ large.

The second option also calls for total honesty but with a very different result. Were it to be acknowledged that this development, of mixed domestic and business units, is an extension to a historic town which can already provide the retail and market facilities required by any new citizens, a major worry as to the very need for Poundbury will have been addressed. The way is then cleared for the thoroughgoing application of the Poundbury philosophy to the real needs and predilections of late twentieth-century town dwellers. This in turn would enable the dreadful pastiche style to be junked in favour of a new architectural regimen which inherits the standards of the past and uses them in forging new building designs fully applicable to our own culture.

Thus materials could be used honestly, in the way our ancestors did. Poundbury would become a truly beautiful and exciting place where elegant solutions to our modern problems of how to live and work sanely are found and how 'green' technology can be harnessed to fulfil everyday needs. The model could then be advocated as suitable for adoption by other developers as being a demonstrable improvement on their current practices. All bombastic pretensions dropped and buildings erected to address genuine need, rather than uses invented as an excuse to build, the place will come alive with people engaged in meaningful activity in an environment that truly respects the landscape in which it stands.

Salesmen are frequently caught out in their silly insistence of appealing to the lowest common denominator of consumers' supposed taste. Surely as many people exist with sensitivities to their environment, albeit latent, as those without and would be attracted by buildings of a quality to march with those of our predecessors rather than poor copies of them; buildings which, in Hardy's words, have only to wait to become poetic.

As it is, Poundbury is in danger of being consigned to the dustbin of history by future generations as one of Time's laughing-stocks.

Editorial postscript

While I agree with Mr Walker's argument, I was surprised by some aspects of the estate when I visited it to take the photographs. Land-take at Poundbury is clearly less than it would have been in a comparable development; for instance at Fordington Fields, large distributor roads meander meaninglessly through the landscape, leaving wide swaths of useless grass verge, themselves usually flanked by forbidding garden walls and fences. Bringing the houses virtually to pavement edge at Poundbury clearly increases the scheme's density and generates places (of a kind), rather than anonymous suburban left-over spaces; curiously, there seems to be little diminution in privacy within the houses. Though the first phase is owner-occupied, much of the next is for a housing association (social housing), and there appears to be hope that Poundbury will offer a richer social mix than most suburbs.

The quality of building (by Messrs C. G. Fry & Son Ltd) is good compared to other local estates, and the materials have some authenticity, though afterwards, you are left with a feeling of nausea from so much pastiche, as if you've eaten too much chocolate.