Don’t call it Petit Hameau
Although affordable housing program design is hard, the easiest task is building new housing. Just throw money, and up pop new homes.
Even if they are caprices.
Such, I conclude, will be the practical consequences of the Prince of Wales’s second venture into town creation, Knockroon, a Highland fling as it were, described in a romantic essay by my fellow Cantabrigian Robert Campbell in his column in The Boston Globe:
Prince’s crowning achievement
His second planned community is designed to encourage residents to exercise
Prince Charles of
He hates the modern stuff – sometimes with reason. Inhuman scale has ruined many an affordable housing property.
The prince believes that modern architecture has spoiled the looks and the livability of British villages, town, and cities - and sometimes the countryside, too.
Given that more than 60% of Britain is protected greenfield, with substantial economic distorting effects, one wonders how the Prince proposes to cope with population growth, urbanization, and increased density.
Agree with him or not, you can’t help admiring the fact that the prince, unlike other architecture critics, puts his money where his mouth is.
Being Duke of Cornwall, hence entitled to a vast annual income dating back to 1337, is an advantage not all of us have.
Edward III: the gift that keeps on giving: land and its rents
He’s about to do that again. He’s sponsoring a new town to be built in rural
The twist this time is health. My source is a report in “
In the nineteenth century, life was lived in black and white
Perhaps it’s noblesse oblige. Royalty has a habit of replicating the urban environment for its own pleasures, such as the Petit Hameau Louis XVI built for his bride Marie Antoinette:
The Petit Hameau (The Little Hamlet), or “Le Hameau de la Reine,” was situated in the English-style gardens of the Petit Trianon. Created in 1783, the Petit Hameau was a mock farm area, complete with farmhouse, dairy, and poultry yard – all areas traditionally associated with women.
When visiting this ersatz farm, Marie Antoinette and her attendants would dress as shepherdesses, and play at milking the cows and tending other docile animals. The farmhouse interior was more opulent, featuring all of the luxuries expected by the Queen and her ladies.
The Petit Hameau was part of the landscape of the “natural” English garden, but it was also a reflection of
The town will be built on open land surrounding a vast estate in Ayrshire, near the existing town of Cumnock:
The new town will be called Knockroon, after a nearby farm. In Knockroon, we’re told, every home will be within a five-minute walk of places to shop and work.
Five minutes’ walk is a quarter mile, four hundred yards. That’s not a town, that’s a village or a hamlet. Until the town grows – if it grows, that is.
Streets will be designed and lighted to favor pedestrians over cars. “Traditional Scottish tenements without lifts” - that is, with no elevators - will encourage exercise.
This sounds enormously similar to Poundbury, the Prince’s other venture in new towns, started with great fanfare just under twenty years ago in
As a retrospective on Poundbury’s development put it a few years back (2001):
Poundbury suffered at first from an almost critical case of bad timing. It was launched in 1989, the year the housing bubble of the Lawson boom burst and the Cold War ended, hitting the defence-based economy of
Markets are unforgiving but they are responsive. Caprices continue on to prove a principle:
The start was slow and painful. For years, it seemed that the village was no more than a couple of streets that looked impressive enough if carefully photographed, but on the ground, with the wind whistling across the exposed hillside, it had more of the feel of the show villages reputedly thrown up by Prince Potemkin to impress his lover, the Empress Catherine the Great. This meant that the polemic was at its fiercest when it was impossible to judge the place.
A dozen years after its beginning, Poundbury is still small and incomplete:
Poundbury, once hyped as the vanguard of a new architectural movement, has been discreetly sidelined and left to its own devices. Meanwhile, the Duchy of Cornwall, no doubt breathing an enormous sigh of relief, has been left to get on with the town, freed from the distraction of the bold statements and endless yapping controversy that accompanied its early years.
When the reporter visited, he found the following:
Now [2001] Poundbury is at last big enough to get lost in. In fact, the layout of winding streets and little courtyards makes getting lost surprisingly easy. About 250 houses have been finished, and the remaining 50 of phase one are on site. Work on phase two, which will be more than twice the size, has begun.
This isn’t scale:
Four factories and seven offices have been built, and completing the whole 2,500-house project within about 20 years no longer seems an absurd pipe-dream. Poundbury is also proving commercially successful. The houses sell quickly, despite a marked premium, and property prices have doubled in three years.
Gradually Poundbury became a town:
Following New Urbanist principles, Poundbury was supposed to reduce car dependency and encourage walking, cycling and public transport.
As it did, the infernal combustion engine fought back:
However, a survey conducted at the end of the first phase, showed that car use was higher in Poundbury than in the surrounding (rural) district of West Dorset.[2]
Once the little hamlet touches the real world, the real world touches back:
No one can call Poundbury a Potemkin village any longer, but it would be fair to describe it as a model village. The feel is that of a carefully crafted estate village, a larger version of Edensor on the Duke of Devonshire’s estate at Chatsworth, or Port Sunlight, the model village built by Lord Leverhulme for the workers at his Lever Brothers’ works outside
I’ve visited Port Sunlight.
Perhaps it’s age and seasoning, perhaps merely scale, but the place has a harmonious comfortability that makes its homes attractive to view. Unfortunately, they’re far from the growth centers.
If Poundbury lay at the gates of Highgrove, all would make perfect sense, but it aspires to be more than this, to be a real town.
Urban Pinocchio wants to be a real boy?
If so, it needs to loosen up. Some within the Duchy of Cornwall acknowledge this. Others clearly like the idea of continued careful control, as if Poundbury were the court town of a petty German principality.
German principality? What we know as the House of Windsor is actually the House of Sax-Coburg, which changed its name in World War I.
Much depends on whether the Prince of Wales still sees Poundbury as a model that others might follow or whether at heart it is a personal indulgence. Now Poundbury has come of age he has to decide whether he can bear to let it go its own way.
Meanwhile, in Scottish
The principal developer is the prince’s own Foundation for the Built Environment. This group, which undertakes projects to improve conditions in older British towns that often are economically depressed, is headed by an American with the very American name of Hank Dittmar. I get Dittmar on the phone.
“Well,” he says, “the Scottish press has highlighted the health aspects of Knockroon. It’s true
“The site will be laced with hiking and biking trails and riverside walking trails. And it lies next to a 1,000-acre estate that will be open to the public. But there’s more to it than health,” he adds. “This is an area, near
For the record, Prime Minister Thatcher didn’t close the coal mines. She stopped subsidizing them and refused to give in to a miner’s strike. That was twenty years ago. The jobs went and they have not come back.
“The prince has asked us to look into a comprehensive program for the whole region. We don’t want Knockroon to be the one and only feature. We’ll look at food, at sustainable energy, at training local people for job skills to help in the regeneration of the area.”
There are many good reasons to build affordable housing. There are many fewer reasons to build an exercise-friendly new town in a rural area whose population is level if not declining.
Like the prince, the New Urbanists prefer the walkable town of the past to the car-dominated sprawl of today. As in Knockroon, they try to pack buildings a little closer together and to mix many different uses - living, working, shopping, recreating - in a small area, so you can get to everything by foot.
Early modernist architects were famous for being concerned with health, too. But they thought of it in a very different way. Health for them was all about clean white surfaces and indoor-outdoor living.
In much of the world, it still is. But for rich princes, money is subordinate to principle:
The new community will be built on land belonging to the Dumfries House Estate, which was sold to a consortium of UK-wide heritage bodies, supported by the Prince, last year to save it and the house contents for the nation.
The 18th-century stately home and its extensive grounds were formerly owned by Johnny Dumfries, the Marquess of Bute, and was put on sale in the open market.
However, the Prince put together a consortium involving Historic Scotland, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Save Britain’s Heritage and other heritage bodies, which together committed £25m. The Prince chipped in another £20m from his charitable foundation.
Even if we project 10,000 people to live in Knockroon, the cash payment to buy the land is about $4,000 a person. That’s an enormous sum, not scalable – and not enough.
But the heritage consortium needs to raise cash to help fund the purchase and so decided to sell land for building. The foundation was called in to mastermind the ambitious project on a 70-acre site along ecological lines.
Back to
The hope at Knockroon is that health will be part of daily life - not only the health of the populace, but health of the planet.
On that theory, rejuvenate the cities rather than creating a new town in the countryside.
More power to the prince, say I. So what if he’s a little nostalgic? There’s plenty of room in the world for more than one kind of architecture.
No question about it.
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