Once upon a time I found myself in a very small waiting room in St James’s Palace, furnished like a posh-but-thrifty dentist’s with old Sotheby’s catalogues and ancient copies of Country Life, the sound of clock bells and tramping guardsmen percolating from outside. I was ushered into a large room, to be grilled by associates of the then Prince of Wales as to my suitability to be his architectural adviser. Where did I live? Stoke Newington (wrong answer). Would I do other work to supplement the tiny pay I would receive for a supposedly part-time position. Yes (wrong answer). Could I type?
I made it onto a shortlist of two, but the job went to the other candidate. This was a bullet dodged – I would not have thrived in the scheming world of the prince’s architectural court – but it’s fair to ask why I accepted the invitation to apply in the first place. I did not, after all, share his taste for clumsy traditionalist architecture. Because, I naively told my 25-year-old self, the prince had some good instincts: he wanted beautiful new buildings and urban spaces, as did I. We only disagreed on the means. Perhaps, if I got the job, I could educate him towards more intelligent approaches.
The incurable optimist in me still wonders: could his yearnings about the built environment be more beneficially directed? Charles may have been at war with much of the architectural world for nearly 40 years, but might they not unite over what they have in common? They all want sustainable communities and good design. Architects and the monarch also have a shared enemy: the sacrifice of positive architectural qualities to housebuilders’ pursuit of profit.
In the last few years, following a period around the millennium when public taste swung towards modernism, there has been a revival of interest in the king’s ideas. The campaign group Create Streets has been pushing with some success to persuade government to incorporate them into planning policy. Poundbury – the Dorset town built under his direction on Duchy of Cornwall-owned land – is held up as a model for future development. Nansledan, an extension of the Cornish town of Newquay, also on Duchy land, has been built along Poundbury lines. It is hoped to do something similar with a 2,500-home extension to Faversham in Kent.
The idea behind Poundbury was to emulate traditional country towns, both in its planning and the appearance of its buildings. It has pedestrian-friendly squares and streets. It attempts to mix homes, shops and places of work, rather than assign them to separate zones. Its buildings are in a mixture of traditional styles, some cottage-y, some Georgian, some in previously unseen combinations of cupolas, pillars and pointy roofs.
Create Streets and its allies in government call this approach “beauty”. They hope that building in this way will help to address the country’s housing shortage – that local residents will be won over by the loveliness of such developments to the extent that they drop the fierce opposition that usually impedes new housing in rural areas. Events in Faversham, where locals have threatened an “uprising” over the Duchy’s proposals, suggest that the plan to woo objectors with beauty may not be so easy – that many people dislike any kind of new housing in their backyard, no matter what it looks like. But it can’t be wrong to want new development to be an asset rather than a blight.
If you put questions of architectural style to one side, and stop worrying whether it’s better to have pilasters and pediments with your buildings, or clean lines and uninterrupted glazing, the former prince and his antagonists don’t seem so different. If the ambition of Poundbury was to create environmentally friendly, well-designed neighbourhoods, with public spaces where people could happily congregate, where uses, tenures and homes serving different income levels would be mixed rather than ghettoised, such also was the often-stated desire of the late architect Richard Rogers.
Yet Rogers was one of Charles’s foremost adversaries, and Create Streets now show limited interest in engaging with architects whose thoughtful and well-planned housing don’t conform to traditionalist notions of “beauty” – the Stirling Prize winners Mikhail Riches and Alison Brooks Architects, for example. For style, it seems, can’t so readily be overlooked, nor can the ancient enmities between the prince and the architects.
It all goes back to 1984, when the then prince famously denounced a proposed extension to the National Gallery, as “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”. The worst aspect of this project was not its design but its brief – embracing Thatcherite love of private enterprise, the gallery misguidedly proposed to perch its astonishing collection of renaissance art on top of a revenue-raising speculative office block – but, in what was to become a pattern, Charles found it easier to blame architecture than politics.
Further speeches followed. He accused architects of being more destructive than the Luftwaffe. He would deliver, in his familiar plaintive and reedy tones, knock-out blows to designs he didn’t like. He blighted the careers of particular architects, as who’d want to hire someone tarnished by royal disapproval? Aided by like-minded architectural experts, he appeared to become an unofficial addition to the planning system, with proposals for significant projects shown to him before they were submitted for planning permission. Clients and architects would self-censor, producing projects that they hoped would be inoffensive.
His justification was that he was only voicing popular criticisms of architects, who were widely blamed for the real and perceived failings of the tower blocks and “concrete jungles” of the 1960s and 70s. The main problem with his interventions was that they appeared to be indiscriminate, arrogant and often ill-informed. He seemed to abuse the disproportionate effect that the accident of his birth gave to his comments. He ignored the fact that architects themselves were capable of self-criticism and learning from past mistakes – they had stopped designing tower blocks for council housing more than a decade before the prince started his pronouncements. He didn’t try very hard to visit or understand the architecture he vilified.
Architects like Rogers responded in kind and, in the manner of culture wars then and now, shared ground was scorched and the chance of mutual understanding destroyed. A sterile battle of styles broke out, “modernist” against “traditionalist”, which obscured the larger factors – mostly to do with money and power – dictating why places are built well or badly. If you look at the car crash of skyscrapers that has gone up in Vauxhall in London, or at the could-be-anywhere pitched-roofed housing developments that ring country towns, the main driving forces are the priorities of property companies and their abilities to influence planners and politicians. The former is vaguely modernistic and the latter sort-of traditional, but in neither case is architectural style the main issue.
Now Charles is king, which in theory means he will intervene less in matters of public debate. The Duchy of Cornwall has passed to his son, William, who seems to be less passionate about buildings. “First do no harm” should, belatedly, be the monarch’s guiding principle. But if he were to do anything more in the realm of architecture, it should be generous: he could praise those architects who, even if their style is not to his personal taste, dedicate energy and skill to making British towns and cities better places to live. Architects, for their part, could acknowledge that, even if they don’t much like the look of places like Poundbury, they are popular with their residents, and their planning gets some important decisions right.
