Poundbury - King Charles Urban Village - How successful is it?

In this Coronation year we are commenting upon the interventions on architecture of our King since his initial foray into urban design almost 40 years ago. Poundbury is the Urban Village created on the out-skirts of Dorchester by Then Prince Charles, on Duchy of Cornwall land, under the design Guidance of Leon Krier, an Architect and theorist in urban design. The village is on the outskirts of Dorchester, and currently houses around 4000 occupants in an organically planned format, a series of public squares bonded together with winding streets, and punctuated with buildings that reflect traditional forms and details. When you visit a historic English village, town or city, apart from those such as Milton Keynes you will generally find that there will be a historic heart which is characterised by a wide variety of historic buildings, based around winding streets, public squares, churches and other former civic buildings which provide the centrepiece in that location.

Poundbury was planned to incorporate these historic patterns in order to provide instant character, and to take lessons from older settlements in order to provide a 'Sense of Place' for the occupants. How successful has this been? Well there have been a series of articles written over the years on this, this one by the BBC in 2022 gives a fairly even view based upon discussions with one of the residents and the author of the Poundbury Magazine, clearly a true advocate of the development and most importantly a happy resident.

We all have our own views on the style of architecture, and the use of pastiche and whether it is relevant, and to quote one of the original architects here, Richard Morton, 'If we built St Pauls again this year, would it be any less significant'?. The original master-planner Leon Krier, at the time considered the integration of cars to be one of the more important issues, as more than 70% of households own cars, the streets are designed to accommodate them in an abundant and ad-hoc manner. The question is has this worked?

In historic centres, the atmosphere and 'sense of place' is quite often derived from the fact that they were not originally conceived to accommodate the motor car, we have to park and walk, and this gives the pedestrian prominence in the streets and squares, rather than the car.

A cursory tour around the settlement on Google Earth gives the impression of lots of hard-surfacing and the prominence of the car, and this seems to detract from the original concept of creating an intimate environment based upon the lessons of tradition. The residents like living there which is the key to a successful scheme, the concept has been well-developed and clearly the place has a defined character, but for the future and in another location it would be really good to see the motor car taking less dominance, with pedestrians, bikes and limited buses winding through the streets. Maybe also a similar combination of scale, but with modern architecture which is equally relevant, but designed to maximise the use of natural daylight, views and orientation rather than trying to faithfully copy some of the lessons of the past.