Last Thursday, Prince Charles hit out at Prescott’s “fast food” solution to the housing crisis, reports Piers Wehner.
As the rift between the Prince of Wales and the government gaped open last week, the tension among the staff at the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment was palpable. “Am I nervous? Of course I’m nervous,” said Neil Goulder, acting chief executive of the foundation. “I was up at four this morning. The boss is coming today.”
The boss, or Prince Charles as most other people know him, is no doubt a nerve-racking guest at the best of times. The sniffer dogs and policemen patrolling the foundation’s meeting rooms attest to that. But last Thursday staff had even more reason to be on edge.
That morning, speaking on Radio 4’s Today, education minister Charles Clarke had attacked the prince for comments made in a private letter. Prince Charles had said that not everyone had the same talents and abilities; Minister Charles called him a traditionalist, elitist snob. That same day, the foundation was hosting a conference for about 100 architects, planners and developers at its converted warehouse headquarters off Old Street, EC2. Speakers included planning minister Keith Hill, and, more importantly, the prince himself.
Prince Charles was speaking about the built environment — the very subject that had catapulted him into political wrangles two decades ago, when he wrote off modernist architecture as a “monstrous carbuncle”.
Howls of outrage
“My saying anything about the built environment seems guaranteed to elicit howls of outrage from various establishments,” the prince later said, wryly adding that his every utterance was “met by an avalanche of ridicule, vilification and personal abuse” and then later agreed with.
As with the education debate, the clash is about traditionalism versus modernism. Prince Charles is unrepentantly traditionalist. While he denies wanting to build Poundbury-style utopias across the nation — if the idea works, each scheme will be “localised” and therefore unique — he is adamant that traditional designs, materials and approaches are preferable to modern excesses. The foundation is also leading the battle to reintroduce coding and pattern books to urban developments, which would strip much of the autonomy from individual architects.
This goes against government thinking. “Last year, when the deputy prime minister kindly joined us here for a similar conference, he mentioned the ‘wow factor’ in relation to delivering the new building programme,” the prince reminded his audience. Prescott had referred to the striking “shard of glass” planned for London’s South Bank as a building that would make people engage with and live in the new communities the government was planning. The same approach has been used across the country, from Bradford and Barnsley – which have commissioned architecture’s enfant terrible Will Alsop — to the Greenwich Millennium Village (see below).
Lack of individual character
On Thursday, Prince Charles hit back: “The problem with most standardised housing is that it lacks this individual character. Instead, it relies on abstract shapes and colours to make it feel different. In our subconscious we are very rarely fooled by this phenomenon.
“If we want a truly sustainable built environment, we must not let artistic abstractions override the subtle patterns of human life – fashionable obsessions will end up as expensive and wasteful mistakes some 30 years later. Hardly a recipe for sustainability.”
Without “the long-delayed restoration of the balance between efficiency and romance”, the fast-building programme would achieve the same results as fast food, said the prince, “whose global tentacles will, at the rate we are going, eventually strangle the health and welfare of both people and their communities”.
For its part, the ODPM has steered clear of an all-out fight with the prince, with planning minister Hill sharing a platform at Thursday’s conference and saying nice things about Poundbury. But instead of simply being tolerated, staff at the Prince’s Foundation say the prince wants to be listened to. And there are some signs that the government is listening. Concepts such as design coding — which would require authorities to determine what the characteristics are of each particular area, and then oblige all developments to comply with a set of standards based on that — are now being considered by the government.
So far coding is being trialled only in Aldershot, Ashford, Cirencester, Hastings, Newcastle, Rotherham and Swindon. The government says that in exchange for agreeing to follow the code, developments will have a presumption in favour of planning permission. For the prince, this is unacceptable, as is the reluctance by the ODPM to roll out coding and make it compulsory.
Pattern books are welcomed by the ODPM as an interesting idea, but are not being considered for government-led large-scale projects. But, according to the Prince’s Foundation, this means the government risks missing the key to the housing crisis. Design director Paul Murrain says: “The problem with mass-produced housing now is that there is coherence, but no grain of adaptability or nuance. Pattern books would allow that. You would then effectively have one masterplan, drawn from the context of where you are building – and then allow different interpretations of that to provide the organic nuances that appear in a traditional town.
“The government wants to mass produce housing. Fine. But mass production doesn’t have to be modernist or inappropriate. Thomas Cubitt mass produced magnificent homes in Pimlico and Belgravia during the Georgian era using the pattern book approach.”
Hill is not convinced: “The volumes built in the Georgian era were relatively modest. Only 5,000 homes were built in Bath between 1720 and 1800.” The Communities Plan calls for 200,000 homes in the South East alone.
Looking to a different era
The government looks to a different era. “In the post-war period, 60,000 council houses were built within 15 months,” Hill reminded delegates on Thursday, adding that the 1945 programme produced 150,000 prefabricated houses in five years. “We have a tendency to view prefabs as bland, uniform boxes, but we need to focus on what that programme can teach us.”
The government and developers, according to the prince, are in danger of repeating the mistakes of their predecessors. They should, he argues, be trying to create communities that people wish to live in, based on the British landscape, “rather than genetically engineered in the ‘fast building’ laboratory”.
| While the Prince of Wales advocates a pattern-book approach to housing (as seen at Poundbury, middle) John Prescott urges modern prefabricated schemes (such as the Greenwich Millennium Village, bottom) as the solution to the housing crisis. “Standardised housing relies on abstract shapes and colours to make it feel different. In our subconscious, we are very rarely fooled by this phenomenon,”says Prince Charles |
| This week deputy prime minister John Prescott responded to the Prince of Wales’s comments: “Look, I quite admire a lot of the things that he does. But I tell you what, when you’ve got a building that has a ‘wow’ factor, it does lift up the area. He just thinks ‘wow’ needs to be more traditional, I think ‘wow’ needs to be more modern. So what? We find some consensus between us. That’s a wow” |
| The slow road to Poundbury |
| 1984 Prince describes extension to National Gallery as “a monstrous carbuncle” 1987 The site for Poundbury, an urban expansion for Dorchester, is selected 1988 Charles makes his views on architecture clear in a TV series and book, A Vision of Britain 1993 Poundbury starts. The 400-acre project includes four phases and will complete in 2016 1997 Prince sets up the Phoenix Trust regeneration company 1998 The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment created 2002 First phase of Poundbury completed2004 Charles branded “old-fashioned” |
