Towards the end of 1999, Charles’s disenchantment with Tony Blair increased. Much of New Labour’s promise of a fresh beginning – Blair’s pledge to be ‘whiter than white, purer than pure’ – had quickly become tainted. The exposure of Downing Street’s sleazy relationship with Bernie Ecclestone, the owner of Formula One motor racing, Alastair Campbell’s devotion to deceptive ‘spin’, the dispiriting arguments about school standards, and the plans for a vacuous dome in Greenwich to celebrate the millennium, all aggravated his mistrust. Charles blamed government ministers for evasion, especially about the environment. In turn, they felt that his expectations were often unrealistic. But honest debate was difficult with a dynast unwilling to listen to other points of view.
A fierce exchange with John Drummond, the arts administrator and BBC music controller, after a concert at the Bath Festival was an exception. The Bartók and Schoenberg he had just heard, Charles complained, was ‘like scraping a nail over a blackboard’.
‘Your taste in music,’ Drummond replied after a pause, ‘is as execrable as is your taste in art and architecture.’ Charles, he knew, enjoyed the more traditional music of Hubert Parry, composer of ‘Jerusalem’.
As their argument rolled on, the lord lieutenant of Somerset, who had accompanied Charles to the concert, became disturbed. ‘You must stop this,’ he urged Charles’s courtiers. ‘Interpose your body between them.’
‘I’m enjoying this,’ said Charles, laughing. ‘I like John. No one’s honest with me like that.’
Another who did not shrink from giving his opinion to power was Richard Rogers, the prominent British architect who in 2017 was to criticise the prince severely in his autobiography, A Place for All People. For years he had openly called Charles ignorant, privileged and feudal. His candour was not appreciated by its target, not least because in 1999 Rogers appeared to have registered a major victory over him. Not only had he designed the Lloyd’s insurance building, an edifice of glass, exterior metal pipes and lopsided steel, in the middle of the neoclassical City of London, but also the gigantic white fibreglass Millennium Dome, looming over the Thames at Greenwich.
For sixteen years, the two men had fought about the virtues and vices of modernist and traditional architecture. Rogers denounced Charles’s self-appointment as the people’s representative against modern architects as symbolic of anachronistic privilege. For his part, Charles was unyielding in his judgement of a man he regarded as a hypocritical champagne socialist. During the early years of Blair’s government, their battle was unequal. As an admirer of New Labour, Rogers had won the prime minister’s support for ‘Urban Vision’, his scheme to improve the quality of city life without regarding old buildings as untouchable. In 1998 John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, who was responsible for the environment, adopted Rogers’s scheme as government policy.
In 2000, soon after Ken Livingstone’s election as London’s mayor, Rogers was appointed his architectural adviser. Livingstone was paying Rogers £130,000 a year, even though the mayor’s office would also be considering the architect’s applications for planning permission in central London. Both shrugged aside any potential conflict of interest. Some of Rogers’s recommendations might have attracted Charles’s support, but architect and prince found any common ground distasteful. Charles wanted to protect London’s ancient skyline, especially the distant views of St Paul’s Cathedral; Rogers preached enthusiasm, endorsed by the mayor, for skyscraper office blocks.
The campaign to protect Britain’s heritage had started in the 1950s. Conservationists were appalled by the post-war modernists’ crusade to build a utopian society as part of a political and cultural class war. Besides building on the rubble that was the Luftwaffe’s legacy, the unsentimental modernists were demolishing rundown rows of Victorian terraces to erect tower blocks, and creating new towns on rural sites. The conservationists were in perpetual retreat. Their protests against ‘barbarism’, ‘New Brutalism’ and neo-industrialisation had only just prevented the demolition of St Pancras station, the Tate’s portico and all of Whitehall’s Victorian buildings, including Scotland Yard.
Characterised by some as a ‘sod you’ architect, and at fifty-one already in his pomp, Rogers scorned non-believers like Charles because, as one observer noted, the prince ‘lamented the diminution of his royal power in the world and was distressed by the historical processes set in motion by the industrial revolution. His dreams of traditionally designed cities are dreams of a world where people forever know their place and the “divine order” would be resurrected.’
Curiously, Prescott, an Old Labour tub-thumper, appreciated Charles’s campaign for people to live in attractive, socially mixed communities and not in ‘hideous little boxes’. With other ministers, he agreed to meet the prince in the Cabinet Office for a twenty-minute slideshow followed by a speech in which Charles urged them to preserve listed buildings rather than sell them. Thereafter, Prescott would go to Charles’s receptions and listen to criticism of his own schemes to bulldoze swathes of restored Victorian houses across northern England. The deputy prime minister accepted that the modernists’ unqualified derision of the traditionalists was no longer a vote-winner. Most Britons had been converted to the charm of restored Victorian buildings, condemned by the modernists decades earlier as eyesores. Charles could claim some credit for that change.
By 1984, aged thirty-six, Charles had decided that change only happened as a result of provocation. Keen to assert influence, even control, over events, the role of subversive crusader appealed to him. By then he was weary of his private secretary Edward Adeane, whose cautious advice was that he should remain a silent constitutional heir. Instead he would abandon the sidelines and become a heroic troublemaker. He set himself ‘to roll back some of the more ludicrous frontiers of the 1960s’ – including those championed by the arch-priests of modern architecture.
To traditionalists like Charles, Richard Rogers and his fellow social engineers ignored the wishes of communities and aggravated the problems they sought to cure. In retaliation, the prince commissioned Léon Krier, a classical architect born in Luxembourg, to build Poundbury, a new town of 2,500 houses on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall near Dorchester in Dorset. Poundbury was intended to showcase all the traditional designs and values espoused by Charles. Krier’s attraction was not only his sympathy with such ideas, but that, as a former modernist, he was a convert from an ideology he now condemned as ‘utter nonsense. The [modernists’] conception of life was sordid.’
In Charles’s opinion, modern civilisation had become dependent on unsustainable technology, consumerism, economic growth and globalisation, and had disrupted Nature and the ‘organic order’. While critics condemned the tower blocks conceived by modernist architects as ugly and uninhabitable, Charles interpreted their brutalism as a threat to the ancient mysticism that bound mankind. He described modern architecture in opaque language: ‘The prerequisite of the health of each of the Earth’s vital support systems’, he wrote, was ‘an interconnected, harmonic system which could be geometrically measured’. Over centuries, that system protected the world and the natural, divine order of life. Modernist architecture disturbed ‘spiritual harmony’ and led to human misery.
At his happiest playing polo or holding a paintbrush, Charles imagined himself as a scholarly, sensitive Lionheart. To illustrate the power of geometry to restore the natural order, in 2010 he would publish Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, in which he would spell out, over three hundred pages, his core principles.
To gather material for his campaign, he had recruited two like-minded experts, Jules Lubbock, an architect, and Christopher Booker, a journalist and campaigning conservationist to whom he had been introduced by Laurens van der Post. Both were delighted to help. Their arrival in Kensington Palace coincided with an invitation to Charles to attend the 150th anniversary celebration of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) at Hampton Court. The prince was to make a speech, present a prize to an outstanding architect, and enjoy a dinner hosted by Michael Manser, RIBA’s president. For over twenty years, RIBA had supported industrialised building techniques, and praised modernists’ projects such as the history faculty at Cambridge University, designed by James Stirling, regarded as one of Britain’s greatest architects. In 1984, sixteen years after it was completed, the university damned the building as ugly and intolerable to occupy during the summer because it overheated. For Charles and his two advisers, many of RIBA’s members, including Stirling, epitomised the vandals they detested.
The modernists’ latest outrage, Charles believed, would be Peter Ahrends’s proposed extension of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Westminster council was about to approve the plans, distinguished by a round tower built of concrete, steel and glass stuck onto the front of the building. For traditionalists, the tower defiled the majestic Regency and Edwardian façades around the historic square. In Charles’s opinion the gallery would be transformed to resemble ‘a kind of municipal fire station’. As he considered his strategy, he assumed that some of his audience would have supported the proposed demolition in the 1970s of large parts of Soho and Covent Garden (halted at the last moment by Geoffrey Rippon, a nonchalant Tory minister for the environment who made his decision while watching cricket at Lord’s), and had not opposed a similarly ‘modern’ plan to impose a network of motorways on inner London.
Charles knew that cautious comments to RIBA’s members would dilute the impact he sought. The palace of Hampton Court was an appropriate venue for privilege to address the privileged. Like him, none of the architects present lived in soulless, stained tower blocks marooned in barren landscapes, but for the most part in period houses in leafy Chelsea or Hampstead – none more so than Rogers, who occupied two Georgian terraced houses knocked together in Chelsea. He had gutted the interior to increase the height of the living spaces, but had kept the original façades, which by default appeared to bear out Charles’s argument.
As the prince stood to begin his speech on the evening of 20 May 1984, no one anticipated what Michael Manser – the one person in the audience who had been briefed about the speech in advance – called ‘a secret bombshell’. It was a warm, cloudless night – ‘a velvet atmosphere’, thought the developer Peter Palumbo, one of Charles’s unsuspecting targets.
Charles opened with an attack on a proposed nineteen-storey office block designed by the world-famous architect Mies van der Rohe. The tower, clad in amber glass and bronze, would be built by Palumbo at One Poultry, adjacent to the neoclassical Bank of England and Mansion House, and would dominate the heart of the City. Charles of course opposed the Mammonist tower. ‘It would be a tragedy,’ he told his audience, ‘if the character and skyline of our capital were to be further ruined and St Paul’s dwarfed by yet another giant glass stump better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London.’ Palumbo was mortified. He had not been forewarned of the royal attack, which would have damaging financial consequences. Charles was a polo teammate whom he regarded as a friend.
The mood in the room chilled as Charles moved on, comparing pre-war London to Venice and criticising the destruction of English cities that followed the Luftwaffe’s bombing. He then turned to Ahrends’s design for the National Gallery. The proposed extension, he told his audience, would be like ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’.
Outrage spread through the hall. The end of Charles’s speech was met by stilted applause. Ahrends was reeling. ‘The prince’s remarks,’ he said, ‘were offensive, reactionary and ill-considered. He seems to be looking backwards rather than forwards.’ Others agreed that Charles was rude to have used the celebration for such an attack. If a guest of honour at a dinner in Kensington Palace had denounced the monarchy, he would have been just as appalled.
‘Why did you say that?’ Palumbo asked him at the dinner afterwards.
‘I just thought I’d stir things up a bit,’ replied Charles with obvious pleasure, clearly untroubled by the damage he had inflicted on Palumbo and Ahrends.
‘A Peterhouse fogey,’ thought Palumbo, a reference to the Cambridge college, notorious for breeding right-wing codgers with an unusual sense of humanity. Trinity, Charles’s own college and the home of Newton, Byron and Wittgenstein, had obviously failed to make an impression on him. Fogey or not, the royal guest had crossed the Rubicon. Naturally he could not prove that he was right, but he was pleased to have seized his chance to make an agonised complaint, a prophecy and a plea.
In the aftermath, architects were divided. Some declared that they wanted no part in desecrating historic cities. Rogers, however, happily adopted the mantle as defender of modernism. Although he was not responsible for the design of the National Gallery’s extension, he denounced Charles as a philistine for confusing the concrete monstrosities erected by villainous councillors with the technological magnificence championed by architects including Norman Foster, Michael Hopkins, David Chipperfield and himself, the designer of the ultra-modern Pompidou Centre in Paris. But that was precisely Charles’s complaint. In his opinion, the Pompidou Centre disturbed the beauty of the surrounding nineteenth-century buildings. The extremes could not agree.
When James Stirling was asked for his reactions to Charles’s speech, he replied after a pause, ‘God save the queen.’ He had reason to be fearful. Charles’s opposition to the van der Rohe tower and the Ahrends extension delivered knockout blows: both schemes were abandoned. Palumbo’s final, reduced design would be expensively challenged, with Charles’s support, all the way up to the House of Lords. The developer would eventually secure permission to build a comparatively small ‘stump’, designed by James Stirling.
Overnight, Charles became the common man’s hero and won influence over key projects. New ammunition was handed to those campaigning for planners to consider how communities wanted to live. Those who complained ‘I don’t like that modern buildings’ discovered that architects were no longer totally deaf to other opinions. While modernists disparaged as pastiche Charles’s belief that new buildings should include neoclassical features like columns, spires and porticos, the public increasingly admired his championship of traditional design.
Shortly after his speech, Charles made his first visit to Italy. Over the previous twenty years, his travels across Britain and the old Commonwealth had isolated him from European culture. In 1985, as he toured the region around Rome, he had his first sight of Italy’s cultural heritage. Like Richard Rogers he was inspired by the country’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Baroque and Rococo architecture, and overwhelmed by the combination of light, stone buildings and lifestyle. Impressed by Italy’s preservation of ancient towns and their communities, he felt the controversy he had ignited at RIBA’s dinner was all the more justified, and started to search for new opportunities.
Charles had personally witnessed more destitution across Britain than most of Labour’s well-off supporters. Since its beginnings in 1976, the Prince’s Trust had helped thousands of young people from deprived backgrounds to start a new life. Believing that he should ‘do’ as well as speak, Charles launched two charities to help disadvantaged youth: Inner City Aid and the Prince’s Youth Business Trust. Confiding in his main helper, Rod Hackney, a pioneer of community architecture, Charles revealed his concern about British society. Without authority, Hackney repeated their conversation to the Manchester Evening News in October 1985. The headline was electrifying: ‘Prince Charles: My Fears For the Future’. According to Hackney, Charles was dismayed that by the time he became king, Britain could be divided into a have and have-not nation plagued by no-go areas. Those views precisely mirrored the Labour Party’s complaint about the Conservative government that was then in power.
Infuriated with Charles’s dabbling in politics, prime minister Margaret Thatcher demanded an explanation from the palace. None was forthcoming. In retaliation, she rejected Charles’s invitations to engage in his causes. While Hackney was quietly dropped from Charles’s court for his indiscretion, his former boss, seemingly unconcerned by the political storm, set about orchestrating a new debate, encouraged by newspapers that for the first time appointed specialist architectural correspondents. However, the image of a rebel delighted by the controversy he had created was deceptive.
Beyond public view, Charles was racked by self-doubt. Confused by the unexpected realisation that if you wag a finger in politics it might get bitten, he was shaken by the negative reactions he had attracted. ‘They want to destroy me, or get rid of me,’ he wrote to a friend. He then went on to say on radio, ‘There is no need for me to do all this, you know. If they’d rather I did nothing, I’ll go off somewhere else.’ Protesting that his master was ‘misunderstood’, a sympathetic courtier explained, ‘By exposing himself, he prevents a consistent opinion about himself.’ Pertinently, James Boswell quotes Samuel Johnson on 1 November 1784 reflecting an appropriate insight into Charles: ‘Nothing deserves more compassion than wrong conduct with good meaning; than loss or obloquy suffered by one who, as he is conscious only of good intentions, wonders why he loses that kindness which he wishes to preserve; and not knowing his own fault, if, as may sometimes happen, nobody will tell him, goes on to offend by his endeavours to please.’
All the excuses could not disguise Charles’s relentless search for public glory. In 1987, three years after the ‘carbuncle’ speech, in a speech at the Mansion House, he again confronted ‘the architectural mafia’. His theme was the proposed redevelopment of Paternoster Square, close to St Paul’s. One of the competing designs, by Arup Associates, he said, ‘seemed to put St Paul’s in a prison camp and surrounding it with this spiky roofline’, while those by Norman Foster and James Stirling would create a windswept urban square in the midst of bland concrete buildings, a sad feature of many British cities. Again, he illustrated his argument with a headline-grabbing phrase: ‘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.’
The uproar was once again led by Richard Rogers, who had been a peripheral candidate in the competition. The battle lines were set: the privileged prince who advocated neoclassical designs in brick and stone to complement Wren’s cathedral, up against Rogers, the buccaneering son of Italian immigrants. To some, the prince’s and the architect’s modi operandi were strikingly similar. At his Chelsea house, Rogers had acquired the nickname ‘the Godfather’, alternately threatening and charming his enemies: ‘You must kiss his ring.’ The atmosphere at St James’s and Highgrove was not dissimilar. While Charles disdainfully observed that the focus of Britain’s millennium celebrations would be Rogers’s fibreglass dome, the architect could not have imagined that the prince was waiting for a new opportunity to strike him down.
Emboldened by supporters, Charles threw more pebbles in the pond. His first hit the National Theatre, on London’s South Bank, which he described as ‘a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting’. The building, he said, was ‘more like a bunker than a palace [which] followed the fashion for concrete … to cheer up the concrete gulag of an arts complex’.
Next, he described the reading room of the new British Library in St Pancras as ‘like the assembly hall of an academy for secret police’, unlike the ‘beautiful’ reading room in the British Museum which it replaced. Sir Colin St John Wilson, the library’s architect, was devastated. Charles, he complained, used tactics ‘based on ridicule and abuse. You cannot put the clock back. The Nazis tried and look what happened.’ St John Wilson was also embarrassed that his original scheme had required the partial demolition of historic Bloomsbury. Fifteen years later, those who had advocated the destruction of old city centres were condemned as vandals. His final scheme would be completed many years late and over-budget.
Charles then lambasted the City of London’s planners, who had allowed its ‘soul’ to be conquered by ‘the hovering hordes of concrete giants’. Noticeably, neither Norman Foster nor David Chipperfield was explicitly named as a villain. Unlike Rogers, they had no wish to enter the ring against Charles, although like most architects they were united in their mockery of the prince after a BBC film about the development of Canary Wharf in London’s docklands, in which Charles was shown pointing at Cesar Pelli’s fifty-storey office block and asking, ‘But why does it need to be quite so high?’ ‘With all due respect, sir,’ replied Roy Strong, the curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum, who was standing beside him, ‘if that argument had pertained in the Middle Ages, we would not have got the spire of Salisbury Cathedral.’ He did not get a reply.
To consolidate his campaign against the modernists, in 1991 Charles organised a summer school for architects at Villa Lante, a sixteenth-century house in Italy. The following year, he established a permanent headquarters for ‘The Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture’ in Regent’s Park, partly financed at his request by the ruling family of Saudi Arabia and other Arab sheikhs, and the Sultan of Brunei.
Charles’s ideals for the course were further proof that there was no common ground with Richard Rogers. In a circular to prospective sponsors, he emphasised the principles of ‘the architecture of the Heart’. In puzzling, mystical language, he explained that the core of his belief was ‘a Divine Source which is the Ultimate Truth as passed down by our predecessors. That Truth can be expressed by means of numbers – i.e. through geometrical principles and that, if followed correctly, these principles can be expressed with infinite variety to produce Beauty. Beauty, in turn, issues from the fact that its manifestation is a reflection of the order of the Cosmos.’ Man, continued Charles, is ‘a microcosm of this macro-cosmos and that in order to reflect the inherent harmony of the Universe in this Earthly Dimension we need to follow the basic Geometrical principles in this building process’. Such was his blueprint for an educational institution.
The prince further instructed his first director, ‘I want the Institute to teach its students reverence – reverence for the landscape and the soil; for the human spirit which is a reflection in some small measure of the Divine.’ His aim was for architects to allow ‘the correspondence of the natural world with the idea of God; the expression of God within the human spirit; and the potential for architecture to give physical form to those sublime relationships’. Buildings should represent civilisation, hope and ‘human feeling’. Followers of his thoughts were confused. Was Charles simply dreamily idealistic, or was he expressing fears about capitalism and suspicions of technology? Regardless of any judgement, what followed characterised his usual approach.
The institute’s attraction was the surprisingly generous budget. Each student cost over £40,000 to educate, including free trips to New York and Italy for short architectural courses. ‘Charles threw money at his students,’ noted David Porter, a university teacher of architecture. ‘Six times more for every undergraduate than the state sector.’ Despite the largesse, fewer than thirty people enrolled each year, and the results were described as ‘inept, crude and lifeless’ by Adrian Gale, another respected professor of architecture. Gale derided the course – which had not been endorsed by RIBA: ‘The students were being used as Charles’s cannon fodder to promote traditional architecture. They didn’t like that. They just wanted a career. It was a token folly.’
From the outset, the institute’s management was weakened by personality clashes. Charles was criticised for expecting too much from the directors and expressing no gratitude for their efforts. As two of his charities for young people had collapsed under poor management, wasting £14 million, Charles was accused of using his status to establish the institute without sufficient attention to detail or to finance.
Among the casualties was Jules Lubbock. After struggling to solve the institute’s lack of organisation, he travelled by train to Highgrove to ask Charles for payment, and explained to him that he relied on his income to live. An irritated Charles left the room. Shortly after, a private secretary came to tell Lubbock that the interview was over and he should leave. Like so many in the crew who sailed with Charles, Lubbock found he had a limited life on board. The price for any perceived heresy was to be discarded, usually as quickly as possible. And asking for money was definitely a big mistake. His friends would later say that no car was provided to take the now former adviser back to the railway station, a scenario he disputed.
The pattern was to be repeated in 1997, the year of the monarchy’s crisis. Hilary Browne-Wilkinson, the new chairman of the Institute of Architecture, was asked by Charles to find a new director, the fifth in six years. The incumbent, Richard Hodges, was an archaeologist without any relevant teaching experience, and his appointment was deemed to have been an error. Browne-Wilkinson, originally appointed to resolve the institute’s embarrassing legal problems, recommended Adrian Gale, a friend of her husband, as Hodges’s successor. Although a modernist and a pupil of Mies van der Rohe, an idol of post-war architects, Gale felt after his introduction to Charles that they got on well. ‘He was excited,’ he recalled. ‘I caught him in the raw. I could help him build better houses.’
Gale arrived with Adrian Porter, another modernist, to improve the institute’s teaching. At the time there were fewer than twenty students. Browne-Wilkinson’s mission, recalled Porter, was ‘to make Charles less fogeyish and more modern’. As usual, the prince was enthused by new faces, but he doubted that Gale approved of Poundbury. Mark Bolland, in overall charge, was also suspicious of a professor wearing a black shirt. ‘Are you a modernist or traditionalist?’ he asked. Porter replied, ‘That’s cheeky. The world doesn’t divide neatly that way.’
Even more wary of Gale and Porter was David Lunts, an urban planner recruited in 1996 to manage Charles’s Urban Villages Group, yet another new charity, to pioneer the regeneration of towns. But at the outset, neither wanted to challenge Browne-Wilkinson’s judgement. The following year, Lunts and Bolland had to confront the institute’s annual £2.5 million deficit.
‘It’s a basket case,’ Bolland told Charles.
‘I must subsidise it,’ came the reply. ‘I’ll sell my paintings to support it.’
‘You can’t do that,’ said Bolland, laughing. ‘You’re the next king of England. We must rationalise and make it sensible.’ He astutely did not mention that Charles’s paintings sold for barely £2,000.
Much to Charles’s distress, the first target for cuts was Perspectives, a magazine he had created in 1994. Its purpose was to restore the ‘spiritual sense … to the evolution of a new architecture’, inspired by ‘temporary technology’ and traditional buildings. The magazine was deep in debt, which was disallowed by the charity laws. Giles Worsley, the respected editor, was tormented by Charles’s constantly changing opinions. As the magazine wilted, Worsley’s influence waned and he complained of being ‘compromised and ultimately silenced’ by Charles. Perspectives finally closed in 1998.
The magazine’s fate coincided with the prince’s decision that the institute should no longer focus exclusively on architecture. With a new name – ‘The Prince’s Foundation for Architecture and the Urban Environment’ – Gale suggested that the Palladian buildings in Regent’s Park were inappropriate headquarters. ‘We need to move to proper London,’ he told Charles, ‘not remain in a happy part of the world.’
With a friend, he found an abandoned fur warehouse in Shoreditch, a rundown area in east London. Over lunch at Highgrove, Charles excitedly agreed to find a donor to buy and restore the building – the budget was £4.6 million. He discussed how the new student courses would teach the ‘design of habitation without pastiche’ and ‘the journey from public places into the privacy of a home’. The move to Shoreditch, he agreed, would rebrand the school. Rather than posing as an opposition group, the new institute would be recognised as mainstream by the educational establishment. To finalise that ambition, Gale returned to St James’s Palace. The prince entered the room dressed in his Guards uniform. The contrast between the bemedalled colonel-in-chief and the black-shirted architect was ominous.
A familiar cycle started once again. Charles hosted fundraising dinners for the rich, and in turn the foundation’s new supporters were invited to give advice. Porter noticed ‘a lot of manoeuvring around Charles. Everyone was jockeying for position. It wasn’t double- but triple-speak.’
Among the new disputes was the prince’s insistence that the new foundation promote his Poundbury philosophy. Yet another meeting was summoned at Highgrove. Charles, at least no longer in officer’s dress, spoke about building houses that would liberate the common man with sunlight and fresh air without looking modern. His philosophy, complete with sacred geometrics and Sufi-inspired mysticism, permeated his description. Invited to participate, Porter was struck by how ‘oblique it was. No one would talk straight. His officials were buttering Charles up and telling him what he wanted to hear.’ Everyone was familiar with the Islamic art course included in Charles’s foundation curriculum, but once he mentioned the relevance of Islamic geometry to traditional British buildings, there was silence. ‘It was tremendously unclear what Charles wanted,’ recalled Porter. ‘He had a very short attention span and was surrounded by people who assured him that he was doing the right thing. And then Charles suddenly went quiet.’ Porter witnessed a scene more akin to a seventeenth-century court as Bolland, Lunts and others struggled to find suitable words for what the prince wanted: ‘It was immensely volatile. You were either for or against him.’ The balance was in Lunts’s favour. He not only organised conferences and introduced Charles to like-minded people, he also supported his ideas.
Hilary Browne-Wilkinson was troubled, but not disheartened. Over the previous months she had encouraged Gale to design a postgraduate course in the design of houses, homes and the environment. However, unknown to her, Bolland had already told David Lunts that Charles was uneasy about Gale. Then the axe fell.
‘He’s got to go,’ Bolland was told. ‘I don’t want him.’
‘It’ll be very difficult for Hilary, sir,’ replied Bolland.
‘Well, it’s my institute, not hers,’ snapped Charles without hesitation.
Bolland’s message to Lunts was equally tactless: ‘We must get rid of the acolytes. It’s reputationally damaging to the next king, and financially costly.’
In 1999, Browne-Wilkinson drove from London with Gale and Lunts to meet Charles at Highgrove to finalise the new course. After sitting down with the prince and Bolland, neither Browne-Wilkinson nor Gale anticipated Lunts’s announcement: ‘We’re not doing the postgraduate course.’
‘I was shell-shocked,’ recalled Gale. ‘I was silenced. I didn’t have the higher, quick intelligence to see what was happening. I was blown apart by Charles.’ The prince said nothing. Hilary Browne-Wilkinson felt stabbed in the back, but each of the visitors knew that protest was futile.
They returned to the capital before lunch. The institute’s first seven students were about to pass the RIBA exams, the first success for the institute, and important for Gale. That afternoon, he was telephoned by Lunts. ‘You’re out,’ he told him. Gale’s course was duly cancelled, and Lunts took over as director. Porter was similarly dispatched. ‘I was called in by Lunts,’ he recalled, ‘and told: “You’ve lost the confidence of the trustees.”’ In hindsight he admitted, ‘I could not modernise the prince or fit in with the court.’
David Lunts was perfect for the task. He made no attempt to change Charles’s attitudes. Instead, he organised the prince’s mission to persuade developers and planning authorities to adopt his Poundbury principles. Yet frequently Charles was disappointed. On a trip to inspect the incorporation of the Poundbury way into a Wimpey housing development in Jarrow, Charles became distressed. He fretted about the cheap finish – bad street lamps, cheap bricks, the wrong cement, and much more. Not prepared to compromise, he was angry that Wimpey had refused to pay for the high standards upheld in the Cotswold villages around Highgrove. Lunts could not help recognising Charles’s limited understanding of the commercial reality of Wimpey’s standard housing estate.
The same insularity emerged during a trip to Poundbury. Driving to Dorset in his Bentley, Charles told Lunts, ‘I’m having trouble with Léon.’ Lunts was surprised. Léon Krier was not only an accomplished architect, but was admired by Charles as a fellow ideologue.
‘Léon is stuck in his ways,’ the prince continued. ‘Poundbury is wonderful, but we must be more contemporary.’
‘What is it you want?’ asked Lunts.
‘I’d like more twentieth-century architecture.’
Lunts was surprised. ‘What do you mean, sir?’ he asked, wondering whether Charles was belatedly coming to appreciate Richard Rogers.
‘I’d like some arts and crafts in Poundbury, but Léon is determined not to have them.’
Once they arrived, Charles was introduced to the owners of a new two-bedroom house. ‘I have always stuck to the principle,’ he told the couple, ‘that I would not let anyone build a house here that I could not personally live in.’ The occupant of six grand houses did not intend any irony. Nor did he appreciate the unintended humour of his argument that was to unfold with Krier. Standing in one of Poundbury’s small squares, with a fountain gurgling in the background, the two men looked up at an ornamental street lamp. The design particularly pleased Charles.
Unexpectedly, Krier burst out angrily, ‘They’re electric, and we agreed they would be gas.’
Charles looked troubled. ‘Léon can be so difficult at times,’ he told Lunts during their return journey. ‘But do you think he has a point?’