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, to call the lumbering stodge of the National Gallery 'elegant' is simply inane. It's greatest rival for London's Most Insipid Neoclassical Wank is, natch, Buckingham Palace.
In the vid above, His Chazness decries Birmingham's (old) Central Library as looking 'like a place where books are incinerated, not kept'. But what should a library look like? What cultural symbol or language clearly announces a building's purpose? Should a library looks like a giant book? Or be entirely clad with books? Have a large enough sign proclaiming LIBRARY to be totally unambiguous?
In response to the horrors of the Twentieth Century, and indeed, half of the Nineteenth, 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.
There are no painted road markings, no traffic lights, few signs, and a uniform set of period streetlamps. Only replica Georgiana is permitted.
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 straight-faced panto. Featuring on-stage incest.
And it goes on. Streets and streets of particoloured brick-and-render, punctuated with bigger set-piece bits of silliness.
And there are cars. Cars parked on the street everywhere. There are some efforts to hide these, but the Georgians only had stable blocks, not garages or - heavens forbid! - multi-storey 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, usually driven by history and economics, here comes baked-in. Artifices implying bricked-up windows are included in Poundbury new-builds because there was once a window tax in England. Who would deliberately want less light in their house? There's probably some inversely snobbish appropriation here too - the homeowner frugally choosing to brick up windows to minimise his/her tax bill - but when the houses are this expensive it's manifestly daft.
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 acquires a sense of 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.
What appear to be a single house is often purpose-built flats. The fact that such destructive divisions, motivated by rising land prices and rising house prices, have been wrought on genuine Georgian houses by property speculators is surely something to be lamented, not something to ape in a new-build development not in the same way constrained by space.
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, 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. Maybe the water should be enriched with cholera. And maybe the air perfumed by some giant tuberculosis nebuliser. Yes.
It terrifies me that the next King of England thinks that the last two hundred years were entirely a bad thing. This does not bode well for the future.
Poundbury is the scariest place I have ever been.
It terrifies me that the next King of England thinks that the last two hundred years were entirely a bad thing. This does not bode well for the future.
Poundbury is the scariest place I have ever been.
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