Urban villages - the best of both worlds? Urban Villages: the best of both worlds? Andrew Rossiter, Université de Franche Comté From a paper presented at the International Symposium on Urban and Rural Britain at the University of Valenciennes, France, 2002. It was in June 1992 that an unusual architectural manifesto was launched in Great Britain. For the next ten years or more, the manifesto entitled "Urban Villages, a concept for creating mixed-use urban developments on a sustainable scale" continued to make waves, and was much commented and criticised - often unfavourably - in the specialist and general media. In the language of contemporary British town planning, the expression "urban village" has for many people come to be synonymous with the name "Poundbury", the neo-traditionalist suburban development on the fringes of the rural town of Dorchester, piloted and largely masterminded by the Prince of Wales.

Yet although Poundbury is certainly the most extensively developed of Britain's urban village projects, there are many others throughout Britain, and the expression "urban villages" is also used in other English speaking countries to describe modern suburban developments - and in some cases rural developments - that conform (or more or les conform) to certain holistic principles of planning that run against the grain of accepted modern practices in suburban development. This article takes a concise look at the origins of the "urban village" concept, and its definition, before studying the situation of urban village development in the UK today, looking at Poundbury and the other projects throughout the country that were in 2001 affiliated to the Urban Villages Forum, the think tank set up under the patronage of the Prince of Wales. Indeed, no discussion of "urban villages" in a British context can begin without reference to the role of the Prince of Wales who, long dissatisfied by much of the dreary suburban development that has occurred in Britain during his lifetime, has used his position to spearhead the development of socially and architecturally successful sustainable communities designed to avoid the failures of the recent past.

The much-used expression "neo-traditionalist", imported from the United States, clearly establishes the conceptual framework that underlies the urban village movement; urban villages are seen as not just an architectural or planning concept, but one predicated on a form of social organisation that has its roots in a long-established model that has stood the test of time. In Britain, as in the United States, the aim of the proponents of urban villages is not just to design modern living environments that reflect those of a previous and supposedly more stable rural society, but to rediscover the forms of living environment that engendered the stability of such traditional rural communities. In this respect, the "urban village" is a concept that takes its place in a historic British - and notably English - paradigm that has previously been illustrated in the model towns of Lever, Cadbury and others, the garden cities of the first half of the twentieth century, and, in community terms at least, in late twentieth century developments such as Newcastle's Byker village. The expression "urban village" seems however to be an American invention.

The earliest bibliographical reference to the phrase would seem to be a book entitled Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683-1800, by Stephanie Grauman, published in 1980. Yet early usages of the expression do not refer to any specific planning concept, but are a more a convenient pairing of words used to describe certain types of close-knit urban communities whose structures reflected traditional rural models. The phrase was even used as a rendering of the Spanish expression "barrio". It was in the early eighties, however, that the first references to the "urban village" as a planning concept began to appear, in the writings of Christopher Leinberger, a Los Angeles based urban affairs consultant (Urban Villages: The Locational Lessons. Wall Street Journal. New York. November 13, 1984) and Charles Lockwood (The Arrival of the Urban Village in Princeton Alumni Weekly November 1986).

Leinberger used the phrase "urban villages" to describe what he saw as a new tendency towards mixed-use development in suburban America, resulting from the fact that in post-industrial America, there was no longer any need to separate business and residential areas for environmental reasons (pollution, noise, etc.). More recently, and notably in the 1990's, the phrase has been used sporadically in discussions of the American "new urbanism" movement, often by and with reference to neotraditionalist planners Leon Krier and the Andres Duany / Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk partnership; yet generally speaking, American writers and planners - until recently - have made considerably more use of the expression "new urbanism", rather than "urban village". The idea of the "village", with its notions of "community", seems to be particularly English, and it was only in the late 1990's, following the international interest aroused by the first of England's "urban villages", Poundbury, that the expression really began to become popular in the United States and Australia.

It was the Prince of Wales who introduced the concept of the "urban village" into the vocabulary of British planning; the expression is used briefly in his 1989 book A Vision of Britain (the follow up to a 1988 television documentary), though not at the time directly in conjunction with the Poundbury project, which is mentioned. It was also this book that clearly established the dual parentage of the urban village concept in the English acceptance of the phrase; on the one hand, the historic English village tradition, on the other hand the American neotraditionalist architectural planners, notably Krier and Duany. In the final pages of A Vision of Britain, a presentation of Krier's archetypal neotraditionalist development in Florida, the town of Seaside, covers a full five pages, compared to just two covering the development of "model villages" in the U.K. from Saltaire to the garden cities. Yet clearly, however great the influence of Krier on Prince Charles has been, it is the historic English concept of the village, and the idealised view of village life, that form the theoretical models that the British proponents of the "urban village" have sought to translate into a modern idiom.

One may speculate as to whether Prince Charles, while thinking over the possibility of creating a planned modern urban village at Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester, had read P.H.Ditchfield's 1908 book The Charm of the English Village, which had recently been reprinted (1985); there is a lot in this book, most notably perhaps its preoccupation with the small details, the use of materials, and the stylistic and functional variety that characterise traditional English villages, that prefigures the Prince's view of the model community. Along with many other publications, both Prince Charles's and Ditchfield's books are also woven on the loom of nostalgia for a supposed almost utopian past, common to the proponents of New Urbanism, and anathema to many modernists.

In an article in Harvard Design Magazine in 1997, marxist geographer David Harvey, professor at Johns Hopkins university wrote : "The New Urbanism in fact connects to a facile contemporary attempt to transform large and teeming cities, so seemingly out of control, into an interlinked series of 'urban villages', where, it is believed, everyone can relate in a civil and urbane fashion to everyone else." Harvey, however was looking on new urbanism in the fundamentally North American idiom; and although, historically, many earlier settlers in the United States - notably in New England - transposed onto north American soil social models imitated from those of the English village, on the whole the American model was, by definition, different. Early American villages may not have been subject to the rectilinear grid planning of 19th century American towns and villages, but neither did they evolve slowly over time in the manner of the historic English village. In addition, America's "New Urbanism", as exemplified by Seaside, is rather different from the English "urban village" as first exemplified at Poundbury.

Ditchfield (1908) more than once stresses the particular nature of English villages, even as opposed to villages in other parts of Europe, referring to the particular social structure of the English village as the "village commonwealth", a structure that would more normally be referred to in modern terms as the "village community". It should be noted that the notion of "community" is a fundamental building block in the societies of modern English speaking countries, and is considerably more deeply rooted in the English tradition (and more broadly speaking the Germanic traditions) than in that of any newer country, or even of other European countries in which the structures of pre-industrial society had evolved out of Roman law. Since the departure of the Romans, the village has been the core community unit in the British Isles. Though England long boasted, in London, Europe's largest city, and though Britain was the first European nation to undergo major population drift to the towns, the village has always survived - in thought, literature or art - as the ideal, and often idealised, social unit.

In Roman times, cities became the nuclei of life in Britain; but after the Romans left, most of their great cities, with the exception of London, were largely abandoned, the British populations moving out to occupy new village sites outside the city walls or further afield; and whilst in continental western Europe the great cities of Roman times remained great cities after the Romans left, and in many cases remain so to this day, the same was not true in the British Isles. In mediaeval Britain, the extensive devolution of power and authority under the Anglo-Norman feudal system - inherited from the Anglo Saxon period - and the territorial representation that existed in English parliaments from the late thirteenth century onwards, played their role in formulating, in the national psyche, an image of England as being a nation represented emblematically by its villages, rather than by its capital city. In the English mind, London has never been the nexus of national identity in the way that Paris has long been the symbol of France and French life. In Shakespeare, the quintessential images of English life are not those of Henry IV and Bolingbroke at court or on the battle field; they are those of Justice Shallow in his orchard in rural Gloucestershire.

The Industrial Revolution completed, by the mid nineteenth century, a process that had been set in motion by the Enclosures Acts of the eighteenth, precipitating Europe's first massive rural exodus, and with it a further pauperisation of the former rural labourers. It was during this period that poets, artists and novelists, from Blake to Constable to William Morris or Thomas Hardy, began to place rural England at the heart of English art and writing, often in an idealised manner that helped give a new impetus to the longstanding perception of the superiority of English rural society over urban society. The apparent immortality of the BBC's classic radio soap opera, the Archers, set in its fictitious village of Ambridge, is just another more modern illustration of the same point. It is perhaps significant that Trevor Osborne, chairman of the Urban Villages Group, notes, in the introduction to Urban Villages, that "the term 'urban village' will not be readily understood in mainland Europe; when exported to other EC member states, it will need a different label." One might even add : "or to the USA".

It is clearly by another quirk of coincidence that the first English "Urban Village", Poundbury, should have been located on the outskirts of Dorchester, the town immortalised under the name of Casterbridge, in the novels of Thomas Hardy. Proposals for a major expansion of Dorchester were first debated in 1987, and two years later outline planning permission for the westward extension of the town was granted by West Dorset District Council, for a mixed-use residential suburb that will eventually stretch over 400 acres (about 190 hectares). The initial development was to cover 35 acres of land. Prince Charles was involved in the project from the start; the greenfield site on the outskirts of Dorchester was in effect his land, agricultural leasehold land belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall. When the Dorchester council applied to the Duchy to purchase the land for development, the answer they received was more favourable than they had imagined possible. Not only would the Duchy make the land available for development, but Prince Charles himself would oversee the operation, with the aim of establishing an attractive mixed-use and socially mixed suburban development; Britain's first "urban village".

For many in the UK architectural and planning establishment, news that the Prince of Wales was to take charge of a major suburban development project was like a red rag to a bull. Relations between the Prince and many of Britain's leading architects and planners had been, to say the least, tense ever since the Prince had begun airing in public his none-too-complimentary opinions on the architecture and planning of the sixties and seventies. His famous description of Birmingham's new library as looking more like an incinerator than a place of learning, or his much quoted speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects, in 1984, when he described the proposed extension to London's National Gallery as being like a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend", had done little to endear him to the modernists in British architecture. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, reactions to the initial proposals for Poundbury were not favourable, neither in the specialised reviews nor in the architectural columns of the British broadsheets. The project was decried variously as an exercise in retrophilia, a pastiche, an irrelevance, or worse.

That was in 1989; and it is true that Leon Krier's bird's-eye sketch of what Poundbury might look like, published at the time in A Vision of Britain (p138), does look more like a heteroclite exercise in nostalgia than a serious plan for a late twentieth century suburban development. The reality of Poundbury has been somewhat different: with the first phase of building now complete, the earliest streets have already had time to mellow, and as an urban environment, the general consensus among both residents and the press is that this new "urban village" is a success. After its early hostile coverage, the British mainstream press - including the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Mirror and the Mail - has now changed tack, and since 1998 press coverage of the ever-evolving project has been largely positive. Among the common complaints voiced by residents now is that Poundbury is a victim of its success, with large numbers of tourists and visiting architects and town planners who invade their space, sometimes in coachloads, turning their residential quarter into an unintended tourist attraction. So why do they come?

What is it that has established Poundbury as a stopping point on the architect's and town planner's tour of Britain in the early twenty-first century? Firstly, of course, there is its curiosity value - an unusual - some would still say eccentric - act of royal patronage, an experiment in suburban architecture and planning, masterminded by an amateur planner who is due to become the next King of England. Secondly they come to see how the ten point theory of the "urban village", laid out in the Vision of Britain, transforms into reality. Over 22 pages, the book sets out a list of "ten principles we can build upon" in order to create a successful modern urban living environment. These are as follows: 1. Place. That planners should understand the local environment, and design their projects to blend with it. 2. Hierarchy. That the design of buildings should always reflect their hierarchical position in the community, that "public buildings ought to proclaim themselves with pride", and others be designed in function of their value in society. 3. Scale. That buildings should bear relation to the human scale, and the scale of other buildings in an area. 4. Harmony. That buildings should blend harmoniously with others in the vicinity. 5.

Enclosure. That spatial identity is of major importance, and that new developments should incorporate such public spaces as squares and courtyards 6. Materials. that building materials used should reflect the diversity of local traditions, and not conform to any national or international standard. 7. Decoration. That decorative craftsmanship should still be, as it always has been, a major feature of the urban environment. 8. Art. That artistic decoration has a major and a symbolic role to play in the enhancement of the urban environment, and that artists as well as architects should have a role to play in the designing of new living environments. 9. Signs and lighting. That these also contribute to the success of the built environment, not detract from it, and should therefore be put up with care and attention. 10. Community. That a successful community is a place where residents feel involved, and contribute to the planning and running of their environment. While points 1 - 9 can be - and in the case of Poundbury, are being - ensured through the masterplan, point 10 cannot.

A successful community can only be brought about by the people who live in it; and so far, in spite of the fact that Poundbury is still very much an ongoing project, those who live there are happy with their environment and, on the whole, consider it to be a successful community. Besides the above ten points, which essentially concern the architectural and visual aspects of the environment in urban villages, there are other fundamental aspects that distinguish the urban village from other suburban or rural housing projects, aspects that are perhaps rather more fundamental than aesthetics. These are social mixity, and mixed use - together seen as preconditions for the creation of new sustainable communities. As well as reflecting the ten principles, the masterplan for Poundbury was for a housing development that would include a seamless and indistinguishable mixture of owner-occupied dwellings and social housing. The mixed-use plan also called for the inclusion, within easy walking distance of the residential streets, of shops, workshops and factories, enabling residents to live and work in the community without the need for commuting. In many details, the masterplan for Poundbury went against conventional planning orthodoxy.

Its fundamental tenet, mixed use, ran counter to accepted zoning theory, which prefers to concentrate business in business parks, housing in housing estates, and shops in shopping centers. As for social diversity, critics of the Poundbury plan argued that the type of home buyers wanting to buy in Poundbury would not wish to buy houses that shared a dividing wall with social housing units; it was also suggested that the densely-packed housing environment was out of keeping with the tastes and expectations of modern middle-class British house-buyers, more usually attracted by the ideal of detached houses in wrap-around gardens. Others predicted that industry would not want to relocate in the middle, or even on the edge, of a residential area, and that in the end, Poundbury would end up as no more than a "glorified council estate". So far at least, this has not been the case - which is exactly what its planners expected. Having conceived Poundbury as a carefully planned (or, in its critics' opinions, contrived) recreation of a traditional organically developed village, they did not expect to encounter the problems facing many other suburban developments. Like the village, the urban village is conceived as a community of mixed housing, catering for all ages and income groups.

At Poundbury, the first phase of housing consisted of 55 units of social housing, administered by a housing association, the Guinness Trust, and 141 freehold owner-occupier homes, as well as retail and commercial premises. By the time the development is completed, towards the year 2020, Poundbury will have between 2,000 and 3,000 housing units, with social housing accounting for about 20% of the total, in line with the national average. The question that remains, however, is whether the model of Poundbury can be transposed into other settings, or whether the success of this rather middle-class development on the edge of a rather trouble-free county town in the heart of the Westcountry, can be replicated in other areas?

Following the media coverage - both positive and negative - given to the Poundbury project when it was first mooted in the late 1980's, a forum known as the Urban Villages Group was founded in 1989, at the Prince of Wales's behest, under the wing of Business in the Community, an organisation whose purpose is "to tackle economic, social and environmental issues affecting local communities" (Aldous, p8). Among the founder members of the Group were Leon Krier, plus the chief executives of a number of property development companies, housing corporations, and the Managing Director of the Cooperative Bank. The aim of the Group was to encourage councils and property developers to take the urban village concept nationwide, as a viable - if slightly more costly - alternative to the monotonous standardized run-of-the-mill developments, the "edge cities" that have mushroomed, and will continue to mushroom, on the outskirts of most British urban areas.

As of January 2002, eighteen development projects across England are being carried out in partnership with the Prince's Foundation, according to "urban village" principles; none however is as advanced as Poundbury, and some, such as the Westoe Colliery project at South Shields and the Northwich city centre project, are still on the drawing board. Yet as the location of these two projects shows - one in the heart of the depressed northeast, and the other in the rundown centre of a Cheshire town - the "urban village" concept can be, and is being, applied in areas that are very different from semi-rural Dorset. Only two other projects are listed, like Poundbury, as "urban extensions" on greenfield sites, one in Basdildon Essex, the other in Northampton; by far the majority of projects are "urban regeneration" projects on brownfield sites. Some of these are in fact far removed from the "urban village" concept as illustrated by Poundbury.

In particular, the Ancoats project in Manchester, the Jewellery quarter in Birmingham and the Little Germany redevelopment in the centre of Bradford appear more like classic industrial heritage preservation programmes, along the lines of the Albert Dock regeneration scheme in Liverpool, or the redevelopment of Butler's Wharf on the South Bank in London. They are, however, different, inasmuch as these three projects, though they will never become villages in the sense that Poundbury can call itself a large village, have been conceived with the ethos of the urban village concept in mind, and not as just three more chic urban residential areas for the upwardly mobile. Little Germany and the Jewelry Quarter are interesting cases, both being central urban areas which, in the past, had a clear spatial and social identity, the former as the fiefdom of Bradford's German cloth merchants, the latter as the densely populated network of small streets which housed both the homes and the workshops of Birmingham's hundreds of jewelers and watchmakers - a classic historic example of both mixed usage and a clearly defined urban quarter. A hundred years ago, Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter provided employment for some 70,000 people – many of whom lived and worked in the quarter.

Since then, the number of jobs in the sector has fallen by over 90%, and the residential population has all but disappeared. In 2000, the quarter harboured some 1,200 business, but only about 700 residents. The aim of the project is to redress this imbalance, and rekindle the vibrant community that existed at the start of the twentieth century. The Ancoats Urban Village, in Manchester, is different - so different indeed that although Ancoats announces itself as an "urban village", the project's development manager herself is not convinced that it really is one. "I feel uneasy about offering Ancoats as representative of the Urban Villages movement, as it does not conform to many of the criteria that the Urban Villages movement sets out, and although we are still members of the Prince's Foundation, I don't think they would suggest Ancoats as an example of their philosophy; we seem to spend most time disagreeing!" (Lyn Fenton, private letter of 02/01/02).

Ancoats prides itself for its place in urban history, as the world's first industrial suburb – an area in which 13,000 people once lived and worked; the targets of the Urban Village project are to bring people back to live in this historic industrial site, close to the centre of Manchester, through a programme of mixed use residential and business development. Classed as a conservation area in 1989, it is on the UK's short list for designation as a UNESCO world heritage site. In spite of the reservations of the developers, the targets set out in the Ancoats Supplementary Planning Guidance reflect the same principles as those adopted for Poundbury; the fact that this, as some other urban village sites, are not totally new-build areas, does not fundamentally change the perspective. Naturally perhaps, it is not in Britain's great urban centres that other urban village projects closer to the Poundbury model can be found, but on the edges of Britain's smaller towns and cities, as the following two examples illustrate.

The Westoe site in South Shields is being developed by Wimpey on the 17 hectare site of a disused colliery, as a high-density mixed-use and socially mixed suburb with up to 800 homes, its own school, shops and office premises. In Lancashire, the Luneside development at Lancaster, albeit smaller - 6 hectares - is being developed along similar lines. Finally, although only 18 projects are affiliated to the Prince's Trust as recognised "urban village" developments, neither the Prince nor the trust has exclusive rights to the expression, and other new housing development projects elsewhere in Britain, are taking up the label in order to give themselves a certain cachet. Indeed, the "urban village" approach to the design and planning of residential areas has now found its way into official UK government guidelines, a new guide from the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions showing among its primary inspirations: " the 'Urban Villages' movement in the UK and neo-traditional design generally.

Indeed, the design philosophy promoted is essentially one of working with context, promoting pedestrian friendly environments, returning to traditional perimeter block systems, and - where possible - mixing uses." (DETR Website 2002) The current popularity of the notion of the "urban village" in contemporary UK planning would tend to indicate that a sea change in planning theory has taken place in the UK since Prince Charles first launched his vision of Britain in 1989. Whether or not this will result in the recreation of something resembling the types of close-knit communities that existed in nineteenth century, or pre-Enclosures English villages, or even in twentieth century industrial villages, and whether "mixed usage" will really have any serious impact on the social habits of the British in the 21st century, other than reducing car usage, are different matters.

And in the end, it is perhaps of little matter in the context of this paper, in which I have set out to show the peculiarly high value attached to the word village in England, and the particularly strong belief that runs through English thought and culture, that the village - and notably the idealised village with its green spaces, flowered gardens, and friendly folk, is the finest possible form of spatial and social organisation - even in the resolutely urban society of the start of the third millennium. In this respect, the phrase "urban village" has readily come to be seen not as a contradiction in terms, but as a means of having one's cake and eating it, or at least getting the best of both worlds. Bibliography Aldous, Tony. Urban Villages, a concept for creating mixed-use urban developments on a sustainable scale, London, The Urban Villages Group 1992. Ditchfield, P.H. The Charm of the English Village, 1908, reprinted London, Bracken Books, 1985, Harvey, David. The New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap, in Harvard Design Magazine, Winter/Spring 1997, no. 1.

Miller, Anthony. The role of Landscape Architecture in fostering community; Byker, a case study, in L'Espace Urbain Européen, Cahiers du Créhu 6. Annales littéraires de l'Université de Franche Comté 1996 Mumford, Lewis. T, The City in History, Secker & Warburg 1961, reprinted Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1973 &&. Rossiter, Andrew. Retour à l'Utopie? Poundbury; redéfinir la banlieue en village urbain. In Ville et Utopie, Cahiers du Créhu no. 10, actes du Colloque. Presses Universitaires de Franche Comté, 2001. Wales, Charles, Prince of. A Vision of Britain, a personal view of architecture. London, Doubleday, 1989 Webography: Thandani, Diriu A. New Urbanism Bibliography, published by the Architectural Resources Network Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions: About-Britain academic : texts © Authors and About-Britain.com The Buddha of Balmoral.

Cover story, FT magazine, 7 February 2004 | James Harkin ← The Big Chill. The Independent on Sunday (London), 7 December 2003 Shock and gore: the story of Ogrish. FT magazine, 14 January 2006 → The Buddha of Balmoral. Cover story, FT magazine, 7 February 2004 It is six days after the Prince of Wales’s 55th birthday, but he has not had much time to celebrate. In the past week he has visited, among other places, a prison in Lancashire, an old people’s home in Gloucestershire and a brewery in Manchester. Yesterday evening, November 19, President George Bush arrived in London for his state visit and the Prince was charged with meeting and greeting him and accompanying him to a lavish banquet at Buckingham Palace. This afternoon, however, Charles is working for himself. He has come to speak in a converted warehouse in an edgy part of central London. In fact it is the offices of his Prince’s Foundation, the charity he set up in 1999 to inject “a return to human values” in modern architecture and design.

A sympathetic audience of civil servants, architects and town planners has come to hear him speak on one of his favourite subjects, “traditional urbanism”, the idea that people and their communities should be at the heart of urban design. The delegates are seated around huge tables in a grand meeting hall and the atmosphere is jovial and clubbable, redolent of an awards ceremony or a fundraiser for a political campaign. Guest of honour is the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, who is called upon to speak first. After a little of his trademark banter, the deputy PM pays fulsome tribute to the Prince’s model village in Poundbury and slams its modernist critics. “I believe,” he tells the Prince, “that your contribution has raised the level of expectation of the public and the quality of architecture, design and planning. It has raised the debate and raised expectations among professionals.” The gist of Prescott’s speech is that modest urban developments are in, whereas suburbia, “motorway cities” and the car are firmly out. And all this, he says, has already been achieved in Poundbury.

Keen to appear even-handed, however, Prescott also praises Lord Norman Foster’s ultra-modernist Swiss Re building in the City of London, known as “The Gherkin”, and announces his approval for the controversial new “Shard of Glass” building at London Bridge, which, at 1,000ft, will be the highest in London. Then it is the Prince’s turn. Standing stiffly, his narrow shoulders pushed back into a swagger, he takes the bait almost immediately. “We already have a giant gherkin,” he says, in his distinctive baritone whisper. “Now it looks as if we are going to have a giant salt cellar as well.” The Prince wonders aloud whether we are in danger of making London into “an absurdist picnic table”, full of monotonous buildings in the “genetically cloned international style”. Some people, he notes, have criticised him for being stuck in the architectural past. “But I’m beginning to think,” he says, his eyes twinkling in a wry half-smile, “that I’m a little avant-garde.” And then he shuffles awkwardly back to his seat. The British public is now inured to the extravagant outbursts of their Prince of Wales.

The media, too, has tired of tales of the dotty Prince, and has long departed for darker and more scurrilous territory. Less well understood, however, is the philosophy that lies behind Charles’s periodic diatribes and his network of foundations and trusts that now influence more and more areas of British social policy. While the tabloid press is busy accusing Charles of seducing his butler and murdering his wife, the Prince has been stealthily developing a world-view and building up his own networks to put his ideas into practice. It is about time that the rest of us sat up and took notice. Charles’s reputation as a political activist dates from 1982, when, in the course of a speech to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the British Medical Association, he made his plea for the medical profession to take alternative medicine more seriously. His next salvo arrived in 1984, at the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

On that occasion, Charles likened skyscrapers to a series of “glass stumps”, and, famously, compared the proposals for an extension to London’s National Gallery to “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”. Once again, he was ostracised for his efforts. But the place where he has done most to put his ideas into action is a little corner of historic Dorchester. Two-and-a-half hours by train from Waterloo station in London, Poundbury is Charles’s own urban village, a living example of how the man groomed to be King of England would like his subjects to live. The genesis of Poundbury dates from 1987 when West Dorset County Council chose 400 acres of open farmland on the western fringes of the town for housing development. Since the land happened to be owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, the vast holding of 150,000 acres which passed into Charles’s control on his 21st birthday, the Prince saw an opportunity to reply to his growing army of critics. Poundbury is now 10 years old. With its first phase complete, it is home to 750 people.

Another 550 come here from surrounding areas to work: among others, Poundbury hosts a number of small businesses, including a chocolate factory and a publishing company. In 15 years time, it will accommodate around 5,000 people. On the afternoon I visit, Poundbury looks unnaturally clean, a little like the film set for a period drama. Simon Conibear, the Duchy of Cornwall representative who meets me, is a genial and chivalrous man in early middle age. Over lunch in the village’s only pub, The Poet Laureate, he apologises in advance if his advocacy of the place sounds rehearsed. In the past month, he explains, in addition to the usual conveyor belt of politicians and journalists, he has hosted city delegations from Florence and Shanghai. Poundbury was not conceived by the Prince in isolation but was inspired by a growing worldwide movement, most vividly expressed in the US, for traditional urbanism. Along with Poundbury, the other icon of traditional urbanism is a 24-year-old urban village called Seaside in Florida. The Prince, says Conibear, can be a difficult taskmaster, but is very rewarding to work for.

Although he pops in only about twice a year to check on progress, there is little doubt that this remains his personal fiefdom, and he keeps a close eye on its progress. Many of Poundbury’s finest buildings have been designed by architect friends of the Prince as a personal favour. The pub where we have lunch is so called because the Prince named it in honour of his friend, the late Ted Hughes. Just in case the Prince happens to be passing, they keep a bottle of his favourite whisky behind the bar. Among themselves, the local taxi drivers have taken to calling the place Charlieville. As well as a place to live, it seems, Poundbury is also a showcase, a flagship not only for the Prince’s movement for traditional urbanism but for his ability to turn his controversial ideas into a practical reality. It is nothing less than a homage to the Prince’s intellectual ambitions. Poundbury, Conibear explains as he gives me his tour of the village, “is part of a project to undo the mistakes of the last 50 years”.

The state-owned council housing built after the war, he tells me as we pass the grim-looking rows of council houses which circle menacingly around his pristine new village, “made no attempt to address the public realm… they showed their backsides to it”. By contrast, the values which Poundbury seeks to inject back into public life are “self- sufficiency”, “a sense of place”, “community” and “safety”. There can be no doubt that it suits many of its residents. So many wave benignly at Conibear as we walk around that Poundbury begins to seem like a carefully constructed artifice, a theme park laid on for the amusement of passing visitors. The village is regularly accused of pastiche, of succumbing to a twee traditionalism. Even the word “Pound-bury” seems to distil the values of an England fearful of being swamped by other cultures and determined to protect its past. But what period is it attempting to ape? Rather than anything recognisably traditional, Poundbury is an ensemble construction, a potpourri of very different architectural styles plucked from the past. Conibear, however, is keen to downplay the significance of Poundbury’s architectural make-up.

More worthy of export than its distinctive style, he reminds me more than once, is the way the village uses its land, a conscious attempt to recapture the organic form of medieval towns and villages. Residents, he tells me, sign up to a draconian code promising not to deface their roofs with satellite dishes, or to park caravans or boats anywhere in Poundbury. Houses and factories are arranged alongside one another rather than Balkanised into different zones. Narrow streets, pockmarked with humps and bends, make it impossible for cars to do more than crawl around the place. In Poundbury, as Simon Conibear bravely demonstrates, it is possible to stand in the middle of the road without any fear of getting knocked down. More than anything recognisably traditional, the village seems to represent the Prince’s hankering for the quiet life, the outer manifestation of his quest for inner peace. After a decade, Poundbury can count itself a provisional success. A shortly-to-be-published review of the village by Oxford Brookes University will conclude that its residents are largely happy with their lot. The Prince can also congratulate himself for having won some influence on government housing policy.

In his speech at the Prince’s Foundation, John Prescott announced a development of 10,000 new homes in east London that will draw on Charles’s architectural vision. Also telling is that the former chief executive of the Prince’s Foundation, David Lunts, has been head- hunted to work for John Prescott on urban policy. But it is doubtful whether Britain’s chronic lack of housing supply can be solved by handmade schemes such as Poundbury alone, without resort to more ambitious, high-technology housing developments. And for all its plaudits, the quiet, restricted life that Poundbury offers is too popular with older people and is failing to attract enough young families with children. An anniversary review of the village, recently published by the Duchy, admonishes its residents: “Keep Poundbury healthy. Have more children.” My next encounter with the Prince is two weeks later, at a school in the impoverished London borough of Hackney. Bang on time, at 10.40 in the morning, flanked by an army of staff, he marches through the entrance of Haggerston school, tugging shyly at his cuff links and smiling complicitly at the teachers and journalists who have turned out to stare at him.

The Prince is in Hackney to publicise the work of his Prince’s Trust, the social-welfare arm of his fiefdom. Founded in 1976, the Prince’s Trust has mushroomed to become the UK’s leading charity for young people. It focuses its efforts on young people between 14 and 30 who are struggling at school or in finding long-term employment, or who are in trouble with the law. Working with blue- chip companies and with funding from the public sector, the Trust claims to have helped – by offering work experience, loans for business start-ups, etc – almost half-a-million young Britons. The Prince’s Trust says its mission is to promote “self-realisation through challenge, self-esteem through team membership”. In his work with young people, the Prince is keen to show that working on the inner psyche is the key to achieving change in the world outside. Back in the mid-1980s, when the Prince’s zeal for raising the self-esteem of disaffected youth was at its height, he even considered lobbying Margaret Thatcher’s government to make community service compulsory for young people and was only talked out of doing so by one of his aides. A decade later, however, government had caught up.

The Prince’s initiatives to promote self- esteem through community work were an influential precursor of the New Deal programme which Tony Blair made compulsory for unemployed young people shortly after he became prime minister in 1997. The Prince’s Trust now works with the government to deliver those programmes. This morning, the Prince is in Hackney to discuss “barriers to learning” with teenage girls who are in danger of being excluded from school for their unruly behaviour. The event is also designed to win some favourable publicity for the Trust and impress its private-sector backers, some of whom have been invited along for the ride. After a brief chat with the school governors, the Prince is led into a tiny room where a group of girls is nervously awaiting the royal presence. One girl, her hands shaking, presents him with a bouquet of flowers. Before the Prince can sit down, one of his four security men, armed with a special tartan cushion, intervenes to rest it on the plastic chair. What, the Prince wants to know, is holding the girls back from realising their potential? “Drugs, weed and drink,” says one, a little too confidently.

“If you’re out of your head”, she clarifies, “you can’t focus.” The Prince listens patiently, his hands folded on the table, and is treated with all the reverence accorded to a passing pop star. Another girl plucks up the courage to fire a question back. Do you think, she says, that families need two parents? Charles shifts visibly on his cushion, as if uncertain whether to parry the question or to return an honest answer. “I think,” says the Prince after a little reflection, “that it can be helpful to have someone else around to provide a little discipline.” The journalists present, some of whom have been complaining at being corralled into a meaningless PR stunt, suddenly prick up their ears. Seconds after the Prince and his entourage leave the room, the girl who asked the Prince a question is surrounded by journalists demanding to know what she made of the Prince and his answer. Hovering beside them is a silky TV anchorman, already coaching the girl for her first broadcast interview. In addition to Charles’s interests in architecture and social welfare, he has another more visceral commitment. Like many among the landed classes, the Prince is keenly aware of the need for responsible stewardship of the land.

Back in the 1980s, Charles was championing the idea of a “precautionary principle”, an emerging environmental approach to the risks posed by new technology. This aims to shift the burden of proving harm from the potential victims of that harm to those whose activities might end up causing the damage. In the run-up to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which saw the idea of sustainable development move into the policy-making mainstream, Charles even hosted a conference aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia at which delegates thrashed out their differences before setting off for Rio. More recently, the Prince has lent his authority to campaigns against genetically modified foods. “I personally have no wish to eat anything produced by genetic manipulation,” he rather sniffily told readers of the Daily Telegraph in 1998, “nor do I knowingly offer this sort of produce to my family or guests.” He has, however, not shrunk from putting his money where his mouth is. Beginning in 1986, the Prince used his control of the Duchy of Cornwall to farm organic produce – a decision which provoked a degree of eye-rolling among his advisers.

Twenty years after the Prince started out on his environment journey, it is instructive to see just how far he has travelled. The fact that he was called upon to deliver the Reith Lectures in the year 2000 – when he spoke about the environment – was as good a sign as any that the Prince’s views had moved into the mainstream. Likewise, the precautionary principle has moved well beyond its original environmental remit and has been codified within English and European law. In retrospect, too, the Prince’s decision to take his farm organic looks much less eccentric. As the market for organic foods has burgeoned, the Prince’s Duchy Originals brand has become a household name. It now offers over 50 different product lines and boasts a turnover of Dollars 14m a year. So who are the intellectual courtiers who have guided the Prince’s ventures? A good place to begin untangling the intellectual threads that bind Charles’s work, says his friend Jonathan Porritt, is to examine his peculiar upbringing. Porritt, the veteran environmental campaigner and former director of Friends of the Earth, draws connections between a childhood spent walking in the lush and lonely grounds of Balmoral and Charles’s subsequent voyage of spiritual discovery.

Likewise, in his 1994 biography of the Prince, Jonathan Dimbleby paints a picture of a slight, precarious boy, plagued by a lack of self-esteem and hampered by “a debilitating reticence”. At school, he says, the young Prince found it hard to focus for long on the same subject, his attention readily diverted by faraway thoughts. Whatever the reasons, the young Charles turned rapidly inward in search of meaning. His interest in spirituality began in earnest in the early 1970s and led him to the study of Eastern mysticism. Encouraging him in all this was his youthful mentor, the writer and adventurer Laurens van der Post, who purportedly advised the young Charles that the way to truth and understanding lay inside rather than in the external world. David Lorimer, the author of a new book, Radical Prince: The Practical Vision of the Prince of Wales, is a loyal and eloquent interpreter of the Prince’s work and his underlying worldview. While Charles did not publicly associate himself with Lorimer’s book, he did meet the author while it was being written. The book, we can assume, comes with the approval of the Prince.

The best way to characterise the Prince, Lorimer argues, is as a student of the “perennial philosophy”, an eclectic school of thought which puts a premium on the inner, mystical aspects of religion over any external calling. “We are told constantly that we have to live in ‘the real world’,” the Prince has said, “but ‘the real world’ is within us.” In 1990, he even established the Temenos Academy, dedicated to teaching the various ideas of perennial philosophy. Next year, its annual guest lecturer will be the Dalai Lama. The idea that our inner selves need greater recognition and our lives need new sources of meaning runs deep in Charles’s work. In his 1982 speech to the British Medical Association, for example, the Prince’s argument for complementary medicine amounted to a call to treat the inner patient as well as the outer manifestations of disease. He has described his challenge as one of making architecture into something through which we can “experience a sense of belonging and meaning within a rapidly changing world”. According to Porritt, Charles’s spirituality is eclectic but coherent. It combines, he says, “a strong Christian core with definite Buddhist overtones”.

Comb through twenty years of Charles’s speeches, however, and there is little mention of the Christian God. When Charles talks about holiness and reverence, he refers to our relationship not with God but with the earth and the natural world. He has even claimed that the love which he puts into his garden is an act of worship. With his unabashed mysticism, his ideas about harmony and balance and his focus on the inner aspects of spirituality, his belief system seems closer to Buddhism than to church-going, Pauline Christianity. It is a position which seems to sit awkwardly with his designated role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. For all his contemplative and otherworldly nature, however, the Prince is also a consummate networker. Ever since his inner self began to seek outward expression, the Prince has been busy establishing an intellectual court and a legion of charitable foundations with which to get his message into the public domain. He has proved more adept than other royals – a notoriously insular bunch – at bringing in advisers from outside the royal circle, and is keenly aware that the royalty needs allies if it is to survive and prosper. He is also a master of cross-fertilising ideas across his organisations.

On a walk around Poundbury, for example, the visitor cannot fail to notice the newly appointed building devoted to “excellence in complementary medicine”, or that the Duchy Originals food range takes pride of place in the village shop. Leon Krier, an urban planner and architect from Luxembourg with strongly traditionalist views, remembers being head-hunted by the Prince after Charles attended an exhibition of his in London. With his shock of wayward hair and his middle-European pronunciation, Krier was an unusual choice for the job of master planner of Poundbury. He admits to being greatly in the Prince’s debt. “The fact that he espoused those ideas and was prepared to act as a figurehead has made a huge difference,” he says. “A movement (traditional urbanism) which only really existed in the US has, thanks to the Prince, won an international audience.” Sir Crispin Tickell, a former British ambassador to the UN and longtime environmental campaigner, met Charles at a conference in the late 1980s and subsequently found himself invited to Highgrove. The Prince, according to Tickell, “did not have any original thoughts, but rather picked up the general atmosphere.

His chief skill is as a networker, getting together the people involved and using his clout at the Duchy to put something into practice.” Jolyon Connell, editorial director of the current affairs magazine The Week, met the Prince through mutual friends and sees him regularly on a social basis. The Prince, he says, “consults more widely than is public knowledge. He meets many people privately, and not only those with the same opinion. But he has to be discreet.” And then there is the Prince’s personal hobby, as an inveterate letter-writer to government. Recently released government documents show that, over the past 30 years, the Prince has been bombarding ministers with anguished scribbles on everything from Tibet to the plight of Atlantic salmon. Annoyance at the Prince’s regular missives reached a crescendo in September 2002, when some of the letters from “disgusted of Highgrove” were reportedly leaked to the press by irritated ministerial aides. The Prince has so many tools for influencing public policy at his disposal that Porritt goes as far as to characterise him as “a one- man NGO”.

His analogy only fails because, unlike most non- governmental organisations, Charles’s interventions are not bounded by discipline or specialism. More than a simple lobbying organisation, Charles’s enviable network acts as a kind of mini civil service or a shadow government, influencing debates across a wide variety of sectors. When it comes to getting to the core of what Charles believes in, the 21st Prince of Wales is a royal enigma. A staunch traditionalist who worries about declining educational standards, he is also a radical campaigner on behalf of the environment. He sees himself as the scourge of vested professional interests, while the institution he represents is perhaps the most entrenched interest of all. But it remains to be seen whether Charles’s views stem from a single and coherent ideology, or whether he is simply an intellectual dilettante with too much time on his hands. Also questionable is whether his interventions amount to real and meaningful solutions to social problems. It would be easy to cast Charles as just a grumpy old man. When his relationship with the Princess of Wales began to collapse, the British press found it easy to cast Charles as the starchy conservative, as opposed to Diana, the great empathiser and the People’s Princess.

And, sometimes, the Prince is content to be cast in this reactionary role. In the most recent statement of his mission, written for the theological magazine, Temenos Academy Review, Charles writes: “Ever since I witnessed, as a teenager in the 1960s, the ever more frenzied dismemberment of what was left of the traditional framework of our existence – even to the excited pronouncement that ‘God is dead’ – I have dedicated my life to finding ways of trying to bring back the ‘baby’ that was inevitably thrown out with the ‘bathwater’.” There is, however, a very different interpretation of Charles’s career, one which casts him as precisely a product of the 1960s. Just like the Beatles, after all, the young Charles travelled to Asia as a young man and was profoundly influenced by Eastern religions. Like the hippies and environmentalists, the Prince had read and raved about Small is Beautiful, the seminal environmental tract by E.F. Schumacher. In 1973, he even met Schumacher at Buckingham Palace.

Rather than simply a traditionalist, Charles is the baby boomer par excellence, a spiritual and political seeker who has yet to find what he is looking for. The Prince’s intellectual friends are keen to resist placing him on the political spectrum. Sir Crispin Tickell, for example, says that “he simply doesn’t fit into any of the obvious boxes”. But to label the Prince as above politics is surely disingenuous. While his world-view is difficult to shoehorn into the politics of left or right, the issues which he is addressing are the most deeply contested of the age. In recent years, the Prince has generated a great deal of publicity surrounding his role and relationship to politics. His regular letter-writing to ministers has made him equally unpopular with Tory and New Labour governments. But the ideas that Charles champions – sustainable development, the need for a precautionary principle, the need for partnerships between the public and the private sector, for greater corporate social responsibility and for joined-up, holistic solutions to social problems – seem better suited to New Labour than to previous Tory administrations. New Labour, however, is hardly radical enough for the Prince.

Were it not for his privileged position and his passionate enthusiasm for hunting and shooting, this political activist might even have been welcomed as a figurehead by the anti- globalisation protesters in Seattle or Genoa. David Lorimer believes that the Prince is both a radical and a conservative. But perhaps it is better to see his work as a highly successful attempt to update British conservatism. The inner self, at least as identified by Charles, is humble, fragile and resistant to social change. This is conservatism with a small ‘c’, a kind of conservatism that shares a great deal with the activists in the anti-globalisation movement. Charles has often been accused of a patrician hauteur but, at least in its public speeches, he allows himself generous helpings of populism. There is no doubt that his exotic spiritualism taps into a broader yearning for an antidote to the materialism and individualism of modern life. Other moves are afoot to publicise the Prince’s work and improve his public image. A former chief of the Prince’s Trust, Sir Thomas Shebbeare, has recently been appointed to a role co-ordinating Charles’s various foundations, to ensure that they speak with a single voice.

Likewise, the Prince’s suspicion of professional expertise chimes with a public whose mistrust of experts is at an all-time high. “People used to think Charles was cranky,” says Jolyon Connell, “but he has a sound instinct for the issues which worry people. On many of the issues which he has championed, the Prince was well ahead of the game.” Leon Krier agrees with that. The Prince, he says, “takes enormous risks, and does so because he can afford to be less short-term in his thinking. He is slowly building a new legitimacy for the royalty.” For centuries, the British royalty has patronised charities. The nature of Charles’s patronage, however, is rather different. The Prince is fond of expressing his strong views across a wide variety of issues. Without any clear job description, he has used his resources, his influence and his energy to further his causes with zeal. In his position as first heir to the throne, he is entitled to do so. When Charles succeeds to the throne, however, precedent suggests that he will have to be much more careful about what he says.

King Charles could continue with his charity work in the Prince’s Trust, says constitutional expert and professor of government at Oxford, Vernon Bogdanor. But he would have to tone down his more partisan interventions in public debate. The role of the British monarchy, however, is itself in a state of flux. Whereas most European monarchies are now largely ceremonial in their nature, the House of Windsor is still invested with real powers of royal prerogative – the ability to appoint a prime minister from within a hung parliament, for example. In order to justify the exercise of those powers, the monarchy needs a raison d’etre. In a secular age, the idea that it exercises power by divine right is not, of course, tenable. The mystique of divine right has evaporated and cannot be put back in the box. Without it, to borrow one of Charles’s own metaphors, the monarchy is in danger of becoming a carbuncle on the face of a modern, democratic constitution.

In this light, Charles’s attempt to overcome his lifetime existential crisis – his entrapment in a role which he seems to realise has outer form but lacks inner substance, his casting around for renewed meaning and purpose – might be seen as a personal mirror on the faltering steps that the monarchy is taking to adapt itself to the 21st century. The royal family has traditionally sought to associate itself with inherited concepts of service, sacrifice, loyalty, duty and responsibility. But, says the monarchist and theologian Ian Bradley in his book God Save the Queen, it is now beginning to embody a new set of regal values: “healing, wholeness, openness, tolerance and vulnerability”. The monarchy, he argues, “is particularly well-placed to lead the recovery of our lost metaphysical imagination and the resacralisation of our secularised society”. How better to interpret Charles’s work than as a sustained attempt to clothe the customs and tradition which he has inherited with new meaning and reconnect with his putative subjects? In his own austere way, the Prince has been striving to invent a new monarchical rhetoric, to update monarchical values in time for his accession to the throne.

The Queen is now 77 years old, and cannot go on for ever. After 10 years sitting out his family problems, there are signs that the Prince is preparing to go on the offensive in pursuit of his prize. But are we ready for a western Buddhist sitting cross-legged on a makeshift throne? Can we really look up to a King who reveres nothing more than the soil? It might seem fanciful but, like the Prince’s once-reviled bandwagons, the truth is he is likely to get there in the end.

Question: The experimental new village of Poundbury in England, much of which has been built to traditional lines, is built on land belonging to whom?
Answer: Prince Charles