In 1984 HRH Charles, the Prince of Wales, gave a speech that shook Britain’s architectural community to its foundations. In a speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects, Prince Charles said that a proposed addition to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square looked like “a kind of municipal fire station, complete with the sort of tower that contains the siren…a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.”

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The American architectural critic Nikos Salingaros says the prince was “crucified by the architectural press, and the architectural establishment launched an all-out campaign to discredit him.” By 1998, as the fashion for plainness gave way to more flamboyant structures, Charles wrote about “the brash megalomania which sometimes masquerades as creative design.” Years later the attacks go on, and the Prince for his part returns them tit for tat, sometimes with pithy humor that the press loves to quote. He told London’s urban planners: “You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe. When it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble….Around St Paul’s, planning turned out to be the continuation of war by other means.” He accused London’s architects and developers of treating their city “as merely a financial staging post between New York and Tokyo.”by Jim HarganWhile Charles’ flamboyant statements employ a lot of ink, they are only a small part of his architectural philosophy. Indeed, this untrained amateur has developed a coherent and detailed critique of modernist architecture and urban planning that includes an alternative approach to replace it: his famous Ten Principles. Nor has the Prince of Wales been content to issue manifestos; he has put his considerable fortune where his mouth is, founding an architectural institute (The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment) and creating a land development meant to epitomize his theories. That development is Poundbury, in the small Dorset county town of Dorchester.

One of Britain’s most pleasant market towns, Dorchester sits in the middle of Dorset’s famed Hardy Country, a compact oval barely larger than 2 square miles that contains 16,000 people. A densely packed High Street, built along a Roman road, forms its center, framed by the lovely little River Frome on its north and an 18th-century tree-lined parade on its south. Deeply rural lands surround Dorchester on all sides, comprising a rolling landscape made famous by the 19th-century novelist Thomas Hardy: thatched villages, narrow lanes, walled fields, grassy moors, Celtic hill forts and Roman ruins. Not remarkably, tourism is Dorchester’s largest employer after government and health services. It is certainly urban with its tiny area and large population, but no one would describe it as a city, and it is by no means a high-growth center.

Like other British towns, planning regulations have long kept Dorchester from sprawling out into the countryside. Up until 1990, planners had kept Dorchester confined to a bit more than 1 square mile; there was only one major tract that qualified for new development, a farm on the western edge of town, and that was firmly locked up as part of the Duchy of Cornwall. As it happens, Prince Charles is the Duke of Cornwall. In 1991 Charles decided to open this Poundbury Farm tract to development — his way. Dorchester’s new subdivision of Poundbury was to follow the Prince’s Principles and show that new development could be as graceful, attractive and livable as older neighborhoods. Fifteen years later, the results are remarkable.

Neither the Prince nor his opponents are operating in a vacuum; a rich and complex history has led to their confrontation at Poundbury. Before Roman times, the native Celtic Britons lived in dispersed farmsteads, “protected” by a ruling class that lived in earth-banked hilltop forts; the largest surviving hill fort, Maiden Castle, is less than a mile from Poundbury. The hill forts emptied with the end of the Roman occupation, to be replaced with carefully planned civitates, walled towns eventually built of stone, where the old ruling class now donned togas and met in the Roman baths; everyone else continued to live in dispersed farmsteads. The Saxon conquest of Britain (ad 450 to 600) destroyed Roman civilization and town planning, while the rural population remained dispersed. Then, around 880, King Alfred the Great established a new phase of carefully planned urban development with his system of burghs, walled towns that provided protection from raiders, planned crop management and markets for goods. Dorchester was one of the original burghs behind its stone Roman walls, and burgh-like villages surround it to this day.

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