Now it’s Prince William’s turn to shape British town planning

Let a man linger close to the British throne and his mind will eventually turn to architecture. In between drinking and gambling sessions, the prince regent who became George IV commissioned the loopy Royal Pavilion in Brighton. Prince Albert had “a wonderful turn for architecture”, in the fond estimation of his wife, Queen Victoria. Charles III began to pronounce on the subject in the mid-1980s, to many actual architects’ chagrin.

Now it is the turn of Charles’s son. By contrast to his father, Prince William has said little of note about architecture or planning, or indeed anything at all. But as first in line to the throne he is the Duke of Cornwall, which means he oversees 52,449 hectares of land. In one plot far from Cornwall, on the edge of Faversham in Kent, the duchy is seeking permission to build thousands of homes. If the local council agrees, it may affect the whole country. The Duchy of Cornwall draws attention, partly because of its royal sheen and partly because it can build more lavishly and slowly than a commercial outfit. What it builds today, other British developers have a habit of building tomorrow.

Charles’s views on architecture, which he expounded in speeches, a book, a TV programme and many grumpy comments before succeeding to the throne, are both retrograde and radical. Retrograde because he loathes modernist architecture; he described a proposed glassy extension to the National Gallery in London as “a monstrous carbuncle”. Radical, because Charles argued that new developments should be environmentally sound and that pedestrians should take priority over cars before those ideas became fashionable.

Charles’s notions have taken brick-and-mortar form in two suburban developments, which are still being built out: Poundbury in Dorset and Nansledan in Cornwall. Poundbury is a wild mix of styles. It has a pink castellated house, a campanile, a neoclassical apartment building that is supposed to look Venetian but looks more Russian, a Victorian-style warehouse, Georgian revival terraces and some buildings that seem to have dropped in from a medieval village. Modern architecture is rubbish, it implies. Here are some buildings from every other era.

Poundbury is both popular and influential. “It’s changed the shape of housing in Britain,” says Ben Pentreath, an architectural designer who has worked at Poundbury and is now planning South East Faversham, as the new project is known. Many modern housing estates now contain ersatz Georgian and Victorian buildings. Poundbury also helped to persuade mass housebuilders that they should create proper pavements, and that homes for poorer people should look more or less the same as homes for richer people and be scattered among them.

Architecturally, South East Faversham will be more sedate than either Poundbury or Nansledan (where lots of the homes are painted in jaunty shades of blue, green and yellow on Charles’s insistence). Many details in the proposed development, such as bay windows and brick arches above the front doors, have been copied from existing houses in Faversham. It will probably have far fewer Corinthian columns than Poundbury does.

But the layout will be bolder than anything the duchy has attempted so far. In the first phase of the development—the only one for which detailed plans have been submitted—about half of the houses will open not onto roads but onto footpaths adjacent to strips of parkland. Many cars will be shoved into streets behind the homes, and required to park perpendicularly. A resident who drives home from the supermarket will presumably carry their shopping bags through the back garden.

The plans for South East Faversham remind John Boughton, a historian of social housing, of two antecedents. The first is the early-20th-century cottage suburb, which featured gently curving streets. The second is the post-war “Radburn” estate. Named after a suburb in America, Radburn estates are laid out in various ways but they all try to separate pedestrians from cars. In many of them, front doors open onto footpaths.

Radburn layouts are deeply unfashionable today, mostly because they are associated with mid-20th-century council estates. Many such estates seemed like paradises in their early days. They became run-down as a result of deindustrialisation and changes in social-housing policies, which made them receptacles for desperate people. In Radburn estates troublemakers loitered around the backs of homes, where the cars were parked. The footpaths in front seemed quiet and dangerous.

Mr Pentreath argues that footpaths and strips of greenery feel safe if they are well maintained and overlooked by homes. It should be like having a house that opens onto the village green, he says. And South East Faversham will contain a mixture of people, as council estates often did in the mid-20th century. The duchy says that 400 out of 2,500 homes in the development will be socially rented.

Will it be built? If the people of Faversham decided to fight the duchy they might well prevail. But many seem disinclined to do so. Alison Reynolds, a former mayor of Faversham, grew up in a council house in the town. She is relaxed about the house-building that has taken place so far: “We’ve probably trebled in size since I was a child, but it’s still a fabulous place to live.” If the plans are approved and South East Faversham proves as influential as Poundbury, a neglected approach to suburban planning might become trendy again. ■

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