4
Let them have Poundbury! Land, property and pastoralism

In his book on British architecture, A Vision of Britain, Prince Charles included enclosure as one of his ‘Ten Principles’ for the built environment, claiming that it produces ‘privacy, beauty, and a feeling of total safety’ and ‘a recognisable community’.1 A Vision of Britain is formed around Charles's self-positioning as advocating history and rejecting modernist urban architectural style. Yet, his comments on enclosure demonstrate that he knows little history about British agricultural life and the devastating impact of the enclosure system, which removed rights to the commons and drove people from their homes, often into slum dwellings in towns and cities. In fact, Charles's suggestion that enclosure creates ‘a feeling of total safety’ entirely erases the symbolic and physical violence involved in the process.2

Charles's appreciation of enclosure reveals the specificities of his vision of Britain: it is an aristocratic version of the pastoral emphasising class hierarchy and land ownership, contextualised in his own position as England's largest private landowner through the Duchy of Cornwall. For the aristocracy, enclosure meant benefiting economically from privatisation: profiting from renting land back to the lower classes, farming arable lands and erasing the surplus population by forcing them into urban areas. Although A Vision of Britain is positioned as commentary on architecture, implicit in Charles's vision is a return to the class hierarchy of aristocratic landowner, farm managers and peasant workers. The phrase ‘let them eat cake!’ is commonly attributed to Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution in response to her subjects having no bread to eat; her privilege meaning she misunderstood their poverty. This can be paraphrased as ‘let them have Poundbury!’ to illustrate Charles's version of this incomprehensibility. Poundbury also simulates royal attempts to imitate ‘ordinary’ life, as part of negotiating distance between them and their subjects. Indeed, Marie Antoinette's Hameau at the Palace of Versailles is a rustic model village of cottages, a mill and an ornamental dairy.3 She populated this spectacle with workers, whom she occasionally joined to simulate peasant life before returning to the palace. Similarly, George IV commissioned the 1812 construction of Royal Lodge at Windsor Castle as an imitation rustic country cottage.4

The architectural principles Charles documents in A Vision of Britain were literalised in his creation of Poundbury, working with the Luxembourgish architect Léon Krier. Poundbury is a 400-acre urban extension to Dorchester in Dorset, England, built on Duchy of Cornwall land and named after nearby Poundbury Hill which hosts a hill fort, the site of a Middle Bronze Age enclosure.5 Poundbury regenerates a conservative, anti-modernist, neoclassical blend of what Charles calls ‘familiar, traditional, well-tried and beautiful’ architectural styles.6 Yet, it is controversial: Poundbury has been described as a ‘toytown’, and in 2013 the Poundbury road sign was vandalised to read ‘Ugly Buildings’.7

Charles appears to envisage himself as a social, cultural and/or political commentator, and uses his public role to broadcast concerns about architecture, agriculture, science, healthcare, ecology, religion and horticulture. His interventions appear in cultural texts such as his Duchy Originals organic food range, a Labybird book on climate change and the infamous ‘black spider’ memos lobbying government ministers and politicians on his pet themes.8 These have led to Charles's reputation as ‘meddling’. Many commentators criticise him for threatening constitutional conventions for monarchs to be politically neutral; a concern inspiring the BBC drama King Charles III which depicted constitutional breakdown upon his succession.9 Public polling has consistently found that many Britons surveyed would prefer William to be crowned in Charles's place.10

Although Poundbury is a political statement against prevailing architectural trends (urbanisation and postmodernism in particular), Charles links these to social and cultural organisation. Indeed, as this chapter demonstrates, his vision of Britain seems to also be concerned with managing the citizens populating it: arguably an attempt to reclaim a form of sovereign power. Poundbury is an experimental place where all of Charles's concerns play out in material form. His interventions yearn for a past lost to urban modernity, best summarised in a grandiose speech he made in 2002:

I have come to realize that my entire life has been so far motivated by a desire to heal – to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony … so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame.11

His appropriation of religious discourse reignites a sacrosanct understanding of royalty through the ‘royal touch’ and ‘divine right’, where the monarch was positioned as ‘God's agent on earth’ by healing illness and disease.12 There is also an assumption that there is something to heal by returning to a pastoral past, and that Charles himself has been granted the role of shepherding this process of return. In a more recent book, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at the World, Charles channels the romantic poets to describe nature's harmony versus the chaos of man-made industry, claiming that the ancient world had a ‘grammar’ matching nature's patterns, and modern advancements have lost this synchrony.13 Only by re-establishing people's relationship with nature can ‘harmony’ be restored, and Charles maintains that classical architecture, organic farming, alternative medicine and spirituality (amongst others) will achieve this.

In 1993 Charles said he wants to ‘put the “Great” back into Great Britain’, apparently foreshadowing the former US President Donald Trump's controversial campaign slogan ‘make America great again’.14 Indeed, I argue that Charles's visions reveal him as a reactionary figure with conservative political inflections (many regressive political movements, such as Brexit, use similar language of ‘chaos’ versus ‘order’). Charles's ideologies reflect traditionalist, neo-feudalist, High Toryism (or traditionalist conservatism), concerned with maintaining a traditional, landed society by privileging lower taxation, social hierarchies, environmental concerns, agrarianism, ruralism, localism and strong community ties.15 The political commentator George Walden revealingly referred to contemporary versions of High Toryism from Conservative politicians such as Jacob Rees-Mogg as ‘Poundbury Toryism’.16 This conservative imagination opposes neoliberal emphasis on global, technological-connected, mobile cities, preferring provincial, local landscapes.17 Likewise, Charles's assumptions about nature's harmony reflects politically conservative myths about the countryside as ‘a stable, ordered, virtually apolitical society’.18 As the geographer Michael Woods argues, this erases radical political histories in rural Britain, such as the Peasants’ Revolt. Yet, simultaneously, the Duchy of Cornwall was described in the 2019 documentary Prince Charles: Inside the Duchy of Cornwall, commissioned by Buckingham Palace and aired on ITV, as a multi-million-pound ‘business empire’.19 Landownership, property investment and developing infrastructure are central facets of neoliberalism under rentier capitalism.20 This chapter argues that Poundbury illustrates the consolidation of heritage and enterprise under conservative governance.21

Charles situates the ‘destruction’ of social harmony as a postwar phenomenon because of modernist rebuilding projects.22 However, this period also saw postwar economic migration into Britain from former colonies, the decline of Empire and the crafting of the welfare state. Indeed, this chapter argues that Charles's vision is less concerned with 1950s and 1960s architecture, and more concerned with the social, cultural, political and economic changes that dismantled traditional class and racial hierarchies. The tensions in Charles's investments, sitting between a feudal provincialism and financial neoliberalism, are drawn out throughout this chapter.

Building Poundbury: A history

The Duchy of Cornwall (hereafter the Duchy) owns around 135,000 acres of land across 23 counties. This makes Charles, the Duke of Cornwall, England's largest private landowner.23 In 2019, the Duchy reported net assets of £931 million, and its holdings included £53 million in development sites and £291 million in commercial property.24 The Duchy was created by Edward III in 1337 for his son the Black Prince, and is hereditarily owned by male 25 heirs to the throne as Dukes of Cornwall, who are entitled to the annual net revenue surplus of the Duchy to fund their private and public duties. In 2018–19, Charles received £21.6 million.26

Like the Firm itself, the Duchy's organisation incorporates private, public and commercial management. The Duchy's annual reports describe it as a ‘private estate’, allowing it to avoid requests for information made under the Freedom of Information Act.27 Yet, in Prince Charles: Inside the Duchy of Cornwall, the introductory voiceover claimed that ‘the Duke has turned an ancient institution into a business empire that last year made over £21 million in profit’.28 The legal scholar John Kirkhope argues that the Duchy was created by, and is subject to, statute, has its accounts scrutinised by Parliament, and uses its income for public purposes; making it a public company.29 The Duchy also has unique privileges vested in Crown exemption: it is not legally liable for capital gains tax, corporation tax, inheritance tax or income tax, although Charles ‘voluntarily’ pays income tax on personal expenses.30 In 2019, the Duchy had 148 employees working in the head office in London and regional offices across the South-West.31 Although Poundbury remains its most famous project, the Duchy manages various development schemes including a similar urban extension to Newquay, called Nansledan (nicknamed ‘Surfbury’) which will comprise four thousand homes; a sustainable commercial development called Truro Eastern District Centre; and Highgrove Estate in Gloucestershire, where Charles built an organic farming system, Duchy Home Farm.32 Despite describing it as a ‘business empire’ and highlighting its commercial enterprising, Prince Charles: Inside the Duchy of Cornwall codes the Duchy through ideologies of family and morality.33 All Duchy tenants receive Christmas presents from Charles, and he describes his protection of rural land – which he claims is unprofitable – as a gift ‘from my family to theirs’ to maintain community businesses.34 When he visits Duchy property, towns throw mass celebrations for a royal visit.

Charles is, essentially, their landlord. The etymology of ‘landlord’ stems from early fifteenth-century feudalism, an ‘owner of a tenement, one who rents land or property’: the lord of the land.35 For Karl Marx, rent was a principle of capitalist production whereby landowners extract profit from land.36 The campaigner Guy Shrubsole argues that landownership remains central to inequality, whilst the scholars Brett Christophers, Guy Standing and Beverley Skeggs suggest that late capitalism has turned (back) to rent, expropriation and enclosure to extract profit and value.37 Like the Firm itself, the Duchy is invested in aristocratic forms of hereditary ownership, yet operates as a ‘business empire’ with corporate strategy. A 2020 documentary by Republic, The Man Who Shouldn't Be King, documents alleged cases where the Duchy exploited its legal status for profit.38 For example, on the Isles of Scilly, investors letting their second homes out as holiday homes must allegedly give the Duchy some of the income. Other residents were apparently banned from buying their homes’ freehold, currently owned by the Duchy, despite the Leasehold Reform Act 1967 that states that leaseholders can purchase the freehold if they meet particular criteria.39 In 2021, the Guardian revealed that this Act was subject to the parliamentary procedure the ‘Queen's consent’, whereby government ministers must seek the Queen's permission before debating laws which will affect her. Under this procedure, the Guardian claimed that Charles screened laws which would affect the Duchy of Cornwall, and the Duchy was given special exemptions to deny residents the legal right to buy their homes outright.40 Bert Biscoe, a local councillor in Truro, Cornwall, who was campaigning against a new Duchy development project, claimed that ‘Charles does not accept his constitutional responsibilities to Cornwall, he just wants the money. He says “stand up for rural life and the farmer”, and then builds a supermarket and a hundred houses on good quality farmland.’ 41 The Duchy's murky legal status arguably allows it to circumvent laws and policies designed to govern landlords, while simultaneously reaping the profits of rentier capitalism.

Poundbury is a riposte to modernist architecture, which Charles first attacked in 1984. While presenting an award at the Royal Institution of British Architects, he criticised the proposed modernist extension to London's National Gallery as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’, claiming to be airing the views of ‘ordinary people’ whose opposition to modernist style is consistently ignored.42 Charles simultaneously positions himself as a spokesperson for the masses, and claims expert knowledge by suggesting his intimate familiarity of architectural theory.43 In 1986, Charles ventured beyond verbal interventions to establish the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture (now the Prince's Foundation for Building Community), an educational charity to teach urban design principles.44 This work was continued in 1988 with BBC documentary HRH The Prince of Wales: A Vision of Britain, the partner book A Vision of Britain and an accompanying exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, all of which evoked landscape painting to demonstrate the ‘harmony’ of historical architecture versus the ‘chaos’ of modernism.45

Charles's interventions were (and remain) controversial, sparking what the sociologist Dick Hebdige called ‘the Great Architectural Debate’.46 In November 1989, architects attended a sold-out event debating Charles's critiques.47 Many ripostes or defences of Charles's views were aired in publications like the Architectural Review, and the then President of the Royal Institution of British Architects Maxwell Hutchinson published The Prince of Wales: Right or Wrong? in which he argued that Charles abused his royal position.48 Critics have suggested that he ‘exercis[es] benevolent totalitarianism over the mini-kingdom of architecture’. 49 Of course, historically architecture was symbolic of royal power, from palaces and statues to geographical links between royal residences, and religious or political buildings. Charles's direct interventions in an age of constitutional monarchy represent a different form of power.

Poundbury was conceived in 1987, when 400 acres of Duchy land to the west of Dorchester was selected by local government for urban expansion following an affordable housing crisis. The Duchy released the land on the proviso that Charles could manage the design, and Charles hired the architect Léon Krier to design Poundbury on the basis of ‘New Urbanist’ principles.50 In The Architecture of Community, Krier outlines ‘New Urbanist’ principles as favouring, amongst other things: mixed-use buildings, limitations to car access and the expansion of public transport, traditional street patterns, local building materials, distinctive civil buildings and no zoning or segregation.51 These features reflect Charles's ‘Ten Principles’ outlined in A Vision of Britain: respecting the landscape, hierarchy of buildings, scale of buildings, aesthetic harmony, community enclosure, use of local materials, use of decoration, contribution of artists, limiting signs and street lights, and facilitating community spirit.52 All of these appear in Poundbury. Upon completion in 2025, Poundbury will house around five thousand people.53

I visited Poundbury in July 2017. I boarded the train from London to Dorchester, before taking a twenty-minute bus ride from Dorchester to Poundbury's Mansell Square. I employed walking methodology to ‘spatio-analyse’ Poundbury, photography, field note-taking and collected publicity materials to document my experiences.54 Poundbury was just over half-way to completion then, with four ‘Phases’ of development scheduled between 1999 and 2025. The quarters are designed to facilitate walking between home, shopping and work: Phase One centres on Pummery Square with Poundbury Village Stores, The Poet Laureate pub and Brownsword Hall (a community hall). Phases Two, Three and Four take as their centre Queen Mother's Square, which includes a Waitrose and Damer's First School. I began my walk through ‘Phase One’ and Pummery Square, before travelling the perimeter of ‘Phase Two’ via Middle Farm Way to Queen Mother's Square, then exploring the ‘central’ streets of Phase Two. Poundbury's purposefully chaotic design of high-density, mixed-use street patterns made it difficult to achieve this walk methodically, and I frequently became lost, but this contributed to experiencing the space dynamically.55 I visited Poundbury Village Stores, Mayfair Estate Agents, Waitrose and Poundbury Garden Centre. My field-based reflections and photographs feature throughout this chapter.

At the time of writing, CG Fry and Sons Ltd, Morrish Builders of Poole and Westbury Homes Plc undertake construction of Poundbury; social houses are rented through the Guinness Partnership (see below); architects such as Ben Pentreath, Ken Morgan and Andy Kunz have designed individual buildings or streets; Zero C Holdings and Woodpecker Properties develop commercial buildings; the Duchy employee Ben Murphy acts as Estate Director; Simon Conibear is Development Consultant; and Peter James the Project Manager.56 Daily management is undertaken by multiple bodies: the Duchy of Cornwall, Dorset County Council, West Dorset District Council, Dorchester Town Council, the Poundbury Residents’ Association (see below) and Manco 1 and Manco 2 (see below). Multiple contracts ensure the implementation of Krier's design principles: the Poundbury Building Code offers detailed guidance on building materials and roof heights; the Building Agreement controls building design; and all residents receive a Poundbury Design Guidance to manage alterations, and must sign the Poundbury Code upon moving in.57 This reflects how the Poundbury community is controlled and manufactured, as I now explore.

#lovepoundbury: Manufacturing a model village

#lovepoundbury is a hashtag and/or group on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to share local news and events, facilitate discussion between residents and promote the Poundbury community. This is, as I demonstrate, a specifically white, middle-class and middle-aged community, drawing upon markers of middle-class taste. For instance, the Instagram feed consists primarily of lifestyle images to promote Poundbury businesses, such as antiques shop Romans VIII and artisan pizzas from the Engine Room.58

#lovepoundbury reflects how Charles's vision is not merely architectural but concerned also with manufacturing the citizens. A Vision of Britain describes Poundbury as a ‘model village’.59 This partly evokes the miniature villages displayed as tourist attractions, usually featuring model people in fantasy scenarios. This conjures images of Charles ‘playing’ with the Poundbury community, using real people to simulate a fantasy society. ‘Model village’ also describes self-contained communities built by eighteenth- or nineteenth-century landowners and industrialists to house their workers. This began with model cottages built by landlords of large estates, through to the creations of liberal industrialists such as Saltaire in Yorkshire built by the woollen manufacturer Titus Salt, Port Sunlight in Merseyside built by the soap-maker William Lever and Bournville near Birmingham built by the chocolate proprietor George Cadbury. These philanthropic developments aimed to improve working-class living, but also re-established class hierarchies between owner and worker, giving wealthy elites control over workers’ lifestyles from their homes to their exercise regimes.60 The scholar Frank Schaffer describes this as a form of social engineering.61

In Poundbury, social engineering is exercised through the Poundbury Code: covenants and stipulations regulating residents’ use of the built environment.62 This demands no exterior property alteration, no caravan parking, no visible repairing of motor vehicles, no removal of pre-planted shrubbery, no displaying of advertisements or placards, no visible television aerials, clothes driers or dustbins, and Charles's unobstructed access to any property. All commercial buildings are subject to strict guidelines on style and size of shop signage, giving them all uniform branding.63

Social engineering is evidenced structurally through design decisions that privilege older or middle-aged, middle-class or upper-class residents. Most of the shops are independent boutiques rather than chain stores, which does foster the idea of a unique community but compounds class relations by neglecting those requiring cheaper, own-brand goods. The only supermarket is Waitrose, an upmarket food store in receipt of two Royal Warrants. My field notes remark upon multiple wealth-management offices providing financial services to individuals, small businesses and families, suggesting clientele of at least moderate wealth. Retired people and young families are facilitated for with appropriate shops and events, such as Active Mobility for older customers’ living aids, and baby shop Magpie, whilst older children, teenagers and young adults were absent. After visiting, I discovered that a ‘youth shelter’ named the Belvedere has been constructed in a field on the southern perimeter (Figure 4.1), but the stone pavilion was so underwhelming that I did not recognise its use, and residents have reported it is rarely used.64 The geographer Michelle Thompson-Fawcett's Poundbury resident survey found the lack of child-friendly facilities an ongoing complaint.65

4.1 The Belvedere, a youth shelter in Poundbury, depicted in the far distance across the field

These management and design decisions evidence how pre-industrial aesthetics are frequently prioritised over a modern, functional environment. Walkways lined with gravel obstruct prams and wheelchairs, parks lack dog waste bins, few road markings mean that parked cars clog the streets and the decorative pillars outside buildings have allegedly caused accidents (Figure 4.2). Mixed-use neighbourhoods are meant to prioritise walkability between home, shopping and work, but car use is actually higher than the UK average.66 Stipulations on shop signage have displeased companies, with one owner complaining that ‘he relies on custom from visitors to survive, but with the ban on signs people often fail to find him’.67 Indeed, many businesses erect signs ‘illegally’ and remove them when Charles visits.68

Façade is central to Poundbury, and the appearance of historical simplicity often merely masks messier realities. The nostalgic peristyle of Poundbury Village Stores actually houses a branch of food store Budgens (Figure 4.3); the pillars on Strathmore House are painted on;69 gas pipes and ventilation are concealed with gargoyles or intricate designs; and an electricity substation is disguised as a Greek temple (Figure 4.4). History is simulated through Roman numeral construction dates on buildings, which actually translate as ‘2015’.

4.3 Poundbury Village Stores and its interior Budgens

4.4 An electricity substation disguised as a Greek temple, Poundbury

Poundbury's imitative quality has led to its comparison to Disneyland: a faux theme-park simulating history.70 Indeed, it mirrors the neo-urbanist Celebration in Florida, a ‘futuristic’ model town built by Walt Disney that actually recreates the past. Theatrical associations reveal how it commands aesthetics over functionality: it bears resemblance to the Universal Studios backlot in Hollywood, and in 2017 Poundbury was used as an alternative reality for the sci-fi television drama Electric Dreams.71 Poundbury's New Urbanist influence, the town of Seaside in Florida, was used as the simulated world in the sci-fi film The Truman Show.72 In the satirical Channel 4 sitcom The Windsors, which caricatures key royal figures, Poundbury is depicted as a fake, backwards-looking ‘vanity project’ for Charles's ego.73 For example, Charles unveils the eighth statue of himself that Poundbury residents must pay weekly homage to for the fictional ‘Prince Charles Day’, and he evinces horror about a resident installing a boiler, asking ‘what's wrong with a bit of elbow grease and a mangle?’ Lamp posts and other features are made from polystyrene to symbolise simulation.

The 1795 political cartoon ‘Affability’ by James Gillray satirises George III's nickname ‘Farmer George’: an informal referent to his agricultural interests and paternal style of rule.74 In the cartoon, a farmer is bemused by the monarch's incessant interrogation about his life, of which ‘Farmer George’ has little concept, despite his supposed ‘ordinariness’. Similarly, in 2018 photographs by Chris Jackson, commissioned by Clarence House for Charles's seventieth birthday, captured Charles feeding chickens at Highgrove House, dressed in informal boots and trousers like ‘Farmer George’.75 This was part of a set of photographs, including Charles playing with his grandchildren and reading in the garden, and seemed to demonstrate attempts to represent Charles in similarly ‘ordinary’, upper-middle-class domesticity as William and Kate (see Chapter 6).

Poundbury is designed as Charles's utopia: a perfect community untainted by modernism's ‘horrors’. However, as the journalist Owen Hatherley argues, rather than forward-thinking progress, Charles ‘abolish[es] the future in simulation of a fantasy past’.76 His history misrepresents the reality of experiences structured by intersectional inequalities, and reflects his privilege of never having to suffer the ‘gruel, death and cellars’ which prompted the ‘diverse cheap foodstuffs, antibiotics, and good modern housing’ he opposes.77 The subsequent sections of this chapter explore what Charles's ‘fantasy past’ resembles, and how Poundbury simulates this, using the architectural principles from A Vision of Britain.78

‘This creeping cancer’: Anti-modernism, heritage cultures and factories of production

Charles's vision disapproves of modernist architecture: ‘our own heritage of regional styles and individual characteristics has been eaten away by this creeping cancer’.79 Such diagnosis relies on reactionary understandings of ‘Britishness’ (or ‘Englishness’) rooted in pastoral nostalgia of the ‘green and pleasant land’.80 A Vision of Britain commences with a full-page aerial landscape of the British countryside, featuring characteristic rolling country lanes and lush green fields bordered by hedges and trees. This is contrasted, two pages later, with an industrial London dominated by cranes and scaffolding, its implied drabness consolidated by the grainy, black-and-white focus. Such a picturesque depiction is a common representational technique, from early Stuart monarchs fetishising country houses to encourage the gentry to abandon court interests in London and return to the countryside to slow rural decay; sixteenth-century literature contrasting the pastoral to the greed and corruption of cities; and the 1960s–1970s ‘hippy’ movement, which emphasised a back-to-the-land mentality through clothing, craft work and vegetarianism.81

Although Charles came of age during the latter period, and has been described as ‘a hippy’ for his alternative ecological and horticultural practices, his version of the pastoral is not the ‘free love’ iconography of the 1960s.82 Rather, A Vision of Britain references nineteenth-century pastoral writers John Ruskin and William Wordsworth, who although radical in their day now evoke a conservative rurality. This is further consolidated in Charles's association with nineteenth-century institutions the National Trust and Country Life magazine. These institutions connect the pastoral and the national, and call for environmental sustainability through protecting country estates (including hunting and shooting) and encouraging heritage tourism.

The ‘British heritage industry’, which peaked during Poundbury's conception in the 1980s with heritage films and heritage tourism, has a similar ethos.83 This accompanied Margaret Thatcher's ideology of national identity, which evoked nostalgia through fetishising the country estate and Victorian social values as part of the Conservative party's capitalising upon narratives of history, heritage and tradition.84 In aligning the country estate with environmental sustainability, heritage culture overlooks disastrous environmental effects wrought by landownership, for example enclosures destroying common land, and hunting depleting wildlife. Despite Britain being ‘the first industrial nation’, pastoralism and rurality are central to ‘Britishness’. The writer Patrick Wright's term ‘Deep England’ to describe the rural, for example, suggests an inherent connection between the countryside and national identity, whereby the pastoral represents ‘true’ Britain and industrial urbanisation is a manmade veneer.85

Charles's idealisation of the pastoral is not only pre-industrial but varies between a feudal and an agrarian capitalist understanding. A Vision of Britain uses N.M. Lund's painting Heart of Empire (see below for more detail) to illustrate how the Lord Mayor's Mansion House is given ‘appropriate prominence’ in relation to its neighbours.86 This draws on feudal manorial systems of landownership and class stratification. The enclosures he celebrates were key consequences of agrarian capitalism and the ‘formal declaration’ of land as a capital commodity (see Chapter 3).87 Enclosure also features in contemporary systems of neoliberalism and financial capital, with public spaces reshaped as commercial to maximise profit.88 This contradicts community spirit by privatising common land for private interest, as illustrated succinctly in a ‘no ball games’ sign attached to the Brownsword Hall in Poundbury, dictating what individuals can do in public spaces.

One understanding of Charles's comparison between ‘Aerial landscape of the British countryside’ and ‘Industrial London’ is that he considers the countryside more ‘natural’ than the city. This is intimated in Charles's text, which describes the first image as ‘part of an extraordinarily rich tradition which we've inherited from our forebears’, and the second as evidence of the ‘terrible damage [we have] … inflicted on parts of this country's unique landscape’.89 In fact, both images indicate the exploitation of nature for economic profit. The hedgerows and fences in the countryside image result from enclosures that imposed capitalism upon the countryside, and undermined people's common access by turning it into private land. As such, these machine-made sectors of arable farming land are actually factories of production in the same way as the industrial buildings in the second image. Many hedgerows and fences are part of the aristocracy's cultivation of the countryside for their aesthetic pleasure. Charles's vision of pastoralism does not exist independently from the capitalism he claims to oppose, nor does it conform to the natural ‘harmony’ he promotes. In fact, it can be interpreted as what the film scholar Andrew Higson calls a ‘flat, depthless pastiche’ in heritage culture's reproduction of the past.90

How can we interpret Charles's aversion to modernist urban architectural style? Modernism counters hereditary, hierarchical privilege: privileges Charles relies on. It evokes socialist sensibilities, and reveals industries of production. This means making relations of production visible: no hidden vestibules or staircases for servants, as were popular in Victorian architecture, or gargoyles covering gas flues as are popular in Poundbury.91 Architecture also facilitates social developments; for example gas installation eased domestic labour for the working classes (particularly women). This threatens Charles's investment in maintaining a traditional class system. Or, as the architectural critic Herbert Muschamp suggests, reflecting the framework in this book of the Firm as a theatrical and heavily mediated performance:

He's like someone … who has grown up in the midst of an elaborate stage set, and he's furious that there's been a tear in the backdrop, that you can see the pulleys, that the stagehands have walked off the job.92

If modernist architecture makes relations of production visible, Poundbury attempts to re-erect the stage set, props and actors of the ‘upstairs, downstairs’ theatre of historical class hierarchies.

Charles periodises modernist architecture as a postwar phenomenon, underlining his supposition that the 1950s and 1960s are when ‘something went wrong’.93 In fact, modernism has existed since at least the early twentieth century.94 It is true, however, that postwar housing regeneration triggered modernist building projects as part of the postwar welfare state. The journalist John Grindrod argues against demonising the concrete tower blocks characterising this period, as for many people they symbolised escaping the damp and dysentery of inner-city slums.95 Likewise, the suburban zoning that Charles despises established the interwar and postwar middle classes, who benefited from affordable housing within commuting distance to work.96 Charles's rejection of suburbia in favour of mixed-use neighbourhoods could be because suburbia threatened the landlord/serf model of pastoralism.

As the sociologist Nathan Glazer remarks, it is ironic that an architecture concerned with social progress is being condemned as heartless by Charles.97 Charles entirely overlooks the possibility that the working or middle classes might welcome modernism, and his anti-modernist regeneration is presented as philanthropic without ever consulting the inhabitants. Poundbury is a gentrification project that wilfully erases working- and middle-class history and uses architecture to impose particular social, cultural, political and economic ideals on citizens.

‘We raise to heaven that which is valuable to us’: Hierarchy, segregation and social housing

One of A Vision of Britain's principal concerns is the hierarchy of buildings in terms of height and embellishment. For Charles, architecture is the physical representation of ‘our values as well as our social organisations’.98 He uses anti-vernacular language to position religion and state at society's centre: ‘we raise to heaven that which is valuable to us: emblems of faith, enlightenment or government’.99 He approves of, for example, churches (particularly St Paul's Cathedral, see below) and the Tower of London dominating the skyline, but disproves of high-rise social housing, office blocks or corporate skyscrapers. This positions secular, aristocratic or royal figures as class dominators. If the corporate skyscraper represents the capitalist white male ego,100 Charles's concerns about dwarfing the church, the Tower of London and government buildings can be interpreted as insecurities about the destruction of his own royal or aristocratic ego under modernism.

This is visualised in Queen Mother's Square, the primary centre of Poundbury, which is dominated by royal references. Kingspoint House, the largest building in Poundbury, houses a Waitrose, a classed statement due to Waitrose's luxury status. This sits next to the Royal Pavilion, which comprises luxury apartments. Strathmore House – more luxury flats and named after the Queen Mother's father, the Earl of Strathmore – is the most visually imposing building on the square, modelled on Buckingham Palace (Figure 4.5). My field notes describe the yellow panels, grand pillars and lookalike balcony as erroneous in rural Dorset. Next is the Duchess of Cornwall Inn, modelled on London's luxurious Ritz Hotel (Figure 4.6), and finally a statue of the Queen Mother.

4.6 The Duchess of Cornwall Inn, Poundbury

Spatial referents to past and present royals is commonplace (in road or building names, for example), but their meanings become more obvious in Poundbury's context. Royalty's position at the centre of Poundbury can be interpreted as Charles considering royalty as the centre of Britain, whereas it is politically marginal in real terms. It also symbolises the upper classes’ dominance. All housing in the Square is luxury apartments, with those in Strathmore House selling for £750,000.101 The Royal Pavilion website suggests that the development brings ‘to Dorchester design standards normally associated with Knightsbridge in London’, but overlooks the demographic disparity between rural Dorchester and metropolitan London.102 This is especially ironic considering that Poundbury was originally commissioned to address affordable housing shortages in Dorchester.103

Poundbury has failed to address affordable housing.104 Charles advocates ‘pepper-potting’: dispersing social housing throughout housing developments rather than segregating them in outer estates, which he disparagingly claims creates ‘ghettos of crime and deprivation’.105 Again, he pinpoints the postwar period, and the mass production of state-funded, local-authority-run housing estates, as when this segregation issue began – once more overlooking the freedom and safety that these housing estates afforded the working classes. In contrast, Charles claims that pepper-potting facilitates more ‘inclusive’ living 106 and a ‘sense of genuine civic life’ 107 because the social housing is, in theory, visually indistinguishable from its neighbours.

The author Lynsey Hanley argues against pepper-potting because social housing is often still emphasised as different.108 Although smart in appearance, Poundbury's social housing lacks the intricate architectural detail of non-social housing. Much of the social housing is in less desirable vistas, such as on the main highway, and the social scientist Dennis Hardy found that the gardens’ lack of decoration drew attention to the occupants’ lack of disposable income.109 Repeated references to Poundbury's social housing, such as an article in Celebrating Poundbury magazine on ‘affordable housing’, also highlight its presence.110 Thompson-Fawcett's Poundbury resident observation survey found that class divisions were an ongoing concern. Social-housing residents claimed that ‘private dwellings do not care for us mere mortals who have to rent our properties’, whilst non-social-housing inhabitants said that ‘people living in … social housing, do not interact wholeheartedly within the community’, suggesting resentment fostering on both sides of the class divide.111

Little attention is given to how Poundbury's pepper-potting scheme works in relation to earlier, neighbouring social-housing estates. To the east of Poundbury Village Stores, Cambridge Road is adjoined to Poundbury via Cambridge Walk. However, rather than a through-road to encourage multi-community cohesion, bollards limit access (Figure 4.7). This creates a tangible hierarchy between Poundbury and nearby communities. Pepper-potting does not, then, equate to a classless society. Rather, Charles's utopia merely rewrites classed inequalities in an early twentieth-century hierarchical model of the pastoral, where everyone ‘knows their place’.

4.7 Cambridge Walk linking Poundbury to Cambridge Road

The political alignment of this vision is complex. In theory, Poundbury rejects neoliberal individualism for community (although this community does not extend beyond Poundbury's boundaries). But Charles's demonisation of postwar housing reflects Thatcher's flagship ‘Right to Buy’ policy, which gave social-housing tenants opportunities to purchase their properties at reduced rates.112 Poundbury also advocates transferring social-housing stock to independent housing associations. Two hundred and fifty Poundbury homes are owned by the Guinness Partnership, one of the largest housing associations in England, which Charles has been Patron of since 1997.113 In 2015, Guinness Partnership was accused of social cleansing after displacing tenants on Loughborough Park Estate in London for a £100 million regeneration project, demonstrating a motivation for profit over people.114 This illustrates Charles's incorporation of neoliberal models where they are profitable.

Alongside the other largest UK landowners – the Duchy of Lancaster, the Crown Estate, the church and the Duke of Westminster – the Duchy of Cornwall consistently fails to meet affordable-housing targets.115 The journalist Nick Mathiason argues that royal landholders, supposedly acting in benefit of the nation, should have a moral obligation to be socially responsible landlords.116 But Poundbury has always been a commercial venture. Four-hundred-acre plots were originally sold to developers for £40,000 but are now worth twelve times that, and the Guardian unearthed a unique arrangement whereby the Duchy extracts 10 per cent of profits from the Poet Laureate pub.117 Like the Firm itself, capitalist profit is clearly central to Charles's vision, even if it contradicts many of his principles of rural simplicity. These neoliberal values are often masked under veneers of tradition and heritage. Visual signifiers of hierarchy and privilege make visible the classed conflict in Poundbury, and how it recreates Charles's ideal of the aristocrat and the serf.

‘A city built on the water like the centre of another great trading empire, Venice’: Little England, imperial nostalgia and whiteness

A Vision of Britain's centrepiece is a double-page reproduction of the eighteenth-century Italian artist Canaletto's painting The Thames from the Terrace of Somerset House. Here, Venetian iconography depicts the importance of maritime trade in imperial London, with St Paul's Cathedral dominating the skyline. The book overlays this painting with a photograph of contemporary London from the same vantage point: the busy shipyards have disappeared and St Paul's Cathedral is dwarfed by City skyscrapers and industrial cranes. Charles uses this comparison to illustrate the so-called ‘destruction’ of the ‘beautiful’ imperial city vista.118

Although its vision is primarily rural, nostalgic appraisal of London as a mercantile centre is a recurring theme in A Vision of Britain using reproductions of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century oil paintings.119 The picturesque typically emphasises aesthetic ideals over lived experience, and A Vision of Britain embodies this sensibility by failing to reflect on the potential historical inaccuracy, artistic licence or situated viewpoint of the paintings it reproduces. Rather, they operate as de-facto illustrations of London ‘as it was’, which for Charles was a harmonious centre untouched by modernity's chaos.

St Paul's Cathedral operates throughout A Vision of Britain as a key motif to articulate ‘the harmony and scale’ of London, where its subordination is interpreted as symbolising the displacement of the imperial trading empire by corporate commerce.120 The book reproduces N.M Lund's 1904 painting Heart of Empire to illustrate St Paul's as the hub of empire, while city traders bustle below. As the geographer Stephen Daniels describes, the trade's centrality in this image demonstrates that Charles is not opposed to enterprise, rather commerce becomes associated with civic virtue and responsibility.121 The sociologists John Corner and Sylvia Harvey's work on Enterprise and Heritage demonstrates that these two concepts are not distinct; and heritage is increasingly subject to market values through its commercialisation for profit.122 They tie this to Thatcherism, and Thatcher's attempt to merge ‘old’ and ‘new’ wealth while retaining ideologies of some wealth as more superior.123 Charles's own so-called ‘business empire’ – the Duchy – demonstrates that he is not opposed to commercial enterprise.124 Rather, he moralises this through heritage. Indeed, the name of his organic food company, Duchy Originals, codes the business through language of authenticity, tradition and history. Similarly, Poundbury is coded by Charles not as a town built for profit but as an ideological project seeking to regenerate ‘familiar, traditional, well-tried and beautiful’ architectural styles, and ‘heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul’.125 The capital profit is merely an additional bonus to more ‘noble’ ambitions.

St Paul's Cathedral is symbolic of nationalism and Empire. As a location for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, for example, it represented the ‘mother country’.126 Charles's fear about its dwarfing by surrounding skyscrapers could partly, then, be insecurities about decreasing global royal power after Empire. In celebrating London as a mercantile centre, Charles recreates what the English literature scholar Rob Nixon has called the ‘postimperial picturesque’.127 Charles's claim that ‘we should have architecture that celebrates London's mercantile success, and then humanises it’ clearly demonstrates imperial amnesia in erasing Empire's violence, particularly the slave trade on which London was built (in terms of both labour and financing).128 The cultural theorist Paul Gilroy's term ‘postcolonial melancholia’ is useful here.129 Gilroy describes how Britain mourns its imperial power by using selective and nostalgic accounts of its imperial past, for instance by remembering its role in ending slavery and ‘gifting’ independence to former colonies, but forgetting centuries of violence. Charles's insecurities about losing power manifest through glamorising imperial dominance.

Imperialist iconography also features in pastoralism. Empire's global expansion was represented alongside traditional English scenery of thatched cottages and gardens, drawing on romanticised conceptions of ‘Little England’.130 This Great Britain / Little England binary established a national identity as separate from, and culturally superior to, the global Empire. This is racialised: as the sociologist Sarah Neal writes, there is a ‘collapsing of rurality into whiteness’.131 The countryside becomes ‘a place of white safety’ where racialised groups are excluded from national landscapes.132 This remains in Poundbury, where Thompson-Fawcett's 2003 demographic survey found that 97 per cent of Poundbury residents were white.133 The assumed racial homogeny of rural areas was visible in popular analysis of the 2016 Brexit vote, whereby the working-class rural vote was assumed as white, hence erasing racialised rural groups.134 Additionally, the Leave campaign of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) used a nostalgic sense of Englishness with rural landscapes as the ‘ethnic homelands of the English’.135 This partly constructed British citizenship along racialised lines. As Corner and Harvey argue, in periods of globalisation, pastoralism is driven by notions of ‘salvage centered, bounded, and coherent identities – placed identities for placeless times’.136 The sociologist Sivamohan Valluvan suggests this is tied with popular conservatism, and mourning over the ‘putative unity, stability, and public morality ascribed to pre-war national whiteness’, used in right-wing nationalist rhetoric.137 Such rhetoric posits close, and closed, community ties.

The separation of rurality and Empire, and the conflation of whiteness and rurality, are false dichotomies. The historian David Olusoga documents Black Britons’ role in shaping the landscape, from the Roman period to aristocratic families keeping Black children as slaves, to the postwar Windrush, one ship on which British citizens from global colonies arrived in Britain.138 Many country houses were built using profits from colonialism and the slave trade, as the British aristocracy invested their wealth in expansionism and extraction.139 Likewise, as this book describes, the British monarchy was built on imperial power. The ‘postcolonial melancholia’ of A Vision of Britain, as embodied in Poundbury, plays out in the Firm by erasing, masking and/or misrepresenting these histories. In Chapter 7, I argue that the Firm uses representations of Meghan Markle as a bi-racial American to attempt to resolve its problematic histories of racism and colonialism. Charles's embracement, and indeed romanticisation, of these histories illustrates that the monarchy has a long way to go.

Conclusion

I have spent most of my life trying to propose and initiate things that very few people could see the point of or, frankly, thought were plain bonkers at the time, perhaps some of them are now beginning to recognise a spot of pioneering in all this apparent madness.

(Prince Charles accepting the ‘Londoner of the Decade’ award in 2016)140

In September 2016, the local newspaper London Evening Standard named Charles ‘Londoner of the Decade’, an award Charles seemingly interpreted as validation of his beliefs. In his acceptance speech, he contrasted critical tabloid headlines with views from ‘the public’ to demonstrate his apparent populist understanding of ‘their values’, a sentiment echoing his self-imposed role in A Vision of Britain as public spokesman. The award's aim to recognise the ‘most influential people’ seems to endorse Charles's ‘meddling’ reputation, and directly opposes the monarchy's purported political ‘neutrality’.

This future-looking orientation is especially ironic when, as this chapter has described, Charles's views are underpinned by a reactionary, conservative privileging of the pastoral. Poundbury may be framed as a futuristic eco-town, but the reality is anything but.141 It is a ‘simulation of a fantasy past’.142 Simulation and pastiche have been recurring themes of this chapter, and describing Poundbury as ‘Disneyland’ is perhaps the most analytically poignant.143 In Poundbury, feudalist, imperialist, hierarchical, C/conservative, nostalgic conceptions of ‘Little England’ play out in a picturesque setting. It seems to be a space where Charles can ‘play’ with residents; his imaginary utopia brought to life, purely by fortune of his royal privilege and wealth.

If Poundbury stages monarchy, it is a riposte to the contemporary television and digital culture monarchy. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is the postwar period, which as Chapter 2 demonstrated has seen substantial shifts in the Firm's engagement with media texts, that Charles demonises. He privileges a more traditional version of monarchy. Queen Mother's Square can be read as a microcosm of Charles's vision, whereby monarchy is the centre. Poundbury takes the naturalisation of royal power to nature itself. Furthermore, Charles's rejection of suburban housing estates that were central to the composition of the middle classes throughout the twentieth century could suggest a concomitant rejection of the middle classes as a class, as they countered the landlord/serf model that he appears to champion.

Charles is not entirely unaware of contemporary media cultures. The BBC documentary Reinventing the Royals analysed Buckingham Palace's attempts to sanitise negative public reaction to Charles following Princess Diana's death by hiring the public relations executive Mark Bolland as Charles's Deputy Private Secretary.144 In 2015, the Independent uncovered a fifteen-page contract that obligated broadcast journalists to ask only pre-agreed questions when interviewing Charles. This was believed to breach Ofcom rules of independence and transparency.145 One interpretation of the meaning of Charles as a royal figure, then, could be that he is contradictory. He is delighted to accept a ‘Londoner of the Decade’ award yet despises contemporary London; resolutely anti-modernist yet partakes in capitalist wealth creation; espouses housing equality yet facilitates class hierarchies and misses affordable-housing targets; privileges environmentalism yet builds homes on pastured land;146 promotes sustainable futures yet only re-creates the past. Indeed, Charles could be interpreted as the living embodiment of the Firm as told in Running the Family Firm: an anachronistic institution utilising contemporary media technologies, socio-political shifts and forms of capital accumulation; yet not willing to forgo historical privileges.