6 1GT Friday August 7 2020 | the times
Earnest,
yes, but
wildly
annoying
If I had, oh, about
£50,000 to spare I
would love to have
outbid the buyer for
an extraordinary
document auctioned
at Sotheby’s on
Wednesday. Put up
for sale by Steven
Berkoff, no less, it’s
the handwritten
replies of an as yet
unpublished author
to a questionnaire
circulated in 1877
while the author
was still an Oxford
undergraduate.
He answers 39
questions about his
likes, dislikes, hopes
and dreams, and
modesty doesn’t
exactly hold him
back. Asked “What
is your favourite
occupation?”, he
responds: “Reading
my own sonnets.”
What would he look
for in a spouse?
“Devotion to her
husband.” And
asked to state his
idea of happiness,
he says: “Absolute
power over men’s
minds, even if
accompanied by
chronic toothache.”
Anyone who
attended Oxford
University over the
past 900 years will
probably have met
an undergraduate as
insufferable as that.
Sadly, only one of
them grew up to be
Oscar Wilde.I
n southern England an
aristocratic landowner decides
to build a new community for
several thousand people on land
that his family have owned for
centuries. No fan of high-rise
towers and brutalist concrete,
he hires the architect Léon Krier
— the “father of new urbanism” and
a lifelong foe of modernism — to
mastermind this new town and make
it look as if it has been there for ever.
Trendy critics queue up to put
a supercilious boot into what they
regard as a lamentably regressive
project. “Fake, heartless, authoritarian
and grimly cute,” declares the “style
guru” Stephen Bayley. A few are more
sympathetic. “The place is neither
anachronistic, nor utopian, nor elitist,”
the Canadian architectural writer
Witold Rybczynski writes. In fact,
he concludes, it “embodies social,
economic and planning innovations
that can only be called radical”.
I am writing, of course, about
Poundbury, the town developed by the
Prince of Wales on Duchy of Cornwall
land outside Dorchester in Dorset. Or
am I? History is about to repeat itself
— or, perhaps, since we are talking
about a place that already recycles
architectural history, re-repeat itself.
Again an aristocratic landowner is
planning a new community in a place
that his family have owned for
centuries. Again Krier, now 74, has
been hired as the mastermind. And
although this £1 billion scheme has
just received enthusiastic planning
permission from the relevant local
authorities, again the snipers are lining
up to denigrate the designs. Which, I
must say, do look as if they have been
approved by a committee comprising
John Betjeman and Andrea Palladio.
The aristocrat is Aldred Drummond,
a property developer whose ancestors
include two 14th-century Scottish
queens and whose family have owned
the Cadland estate on the banks of
the Solent in Hampshire for 240 years.
In 1953, however — well before this
Drummond was born — a compulsory
purchase order resulted in the family’s
ancestral home being demolished and
a chunk of its shoreline requisitioned
to make way for Fawley power station.
One can imagine the resentment
seething down the generations
because in 2015, after the power
station was decommissioned and theDesigns for a yacht club and art deco-inspired hotel in new town Fawley Waterside, which could be home to 3,500 people
there’s also talk of the place being
“a test bed for cutting-edge smart
technology”. Drummond has floated
the slightly fanciful vision of the
Solent becoming the “UK’s San
Francisco Bay”.
It’s easy to poke fun, and some are
doing so, deriding the references in
Fawley Waterside’s plans to cobbled
streets, cottages, “elegant colonnades”
and an art deco-inspired hotel and
yacht club. “Turning a power station
into a kind of historic style collection
theme park is just a weird thing to do,”
a correspondent writes in last week’s
Architects’ Journal. And it’s true that
the project does have a kind of
movie-set instant historicism built into
it. The central part will apparently be
called the Heart of the Town, even
though it usually takes decades, if not
centuries, for a town to develop a
proper heart. And although the plans
promise “a rich variety of architectural
style”, I doubt this variety will
encompass much that wouldn’t have
been approved by, say, Ruskin in 1880.
Yet I admire the scheme: its
singlemindedness, ambition, attentionto detail, respect for context (part of it
will sit inside the New Forest National
Park) — and, most of all, that it will
almost certainly be a pleasing place to
live for the sort of people who will
want to live there. And if that sounds
condescending, it’s not meant to be.
Too many 20th-century developments
were imposed on people by architects
and town planners in thrall to
theoretical ideas that looked clever on
paper, but which proved disastrously
inhumane when applied in real life.
After this week’s announcement of
controversial reforms to the planning
laws, it looks as if we are about to
embark on an era of new-town
building not seen since the 1950s. It’s
vital that we don’t repeat the mistakes
that make some of those postwar new
towns so soulless. You can criticise
Poundbury for many things — and,
yes, pandering to Britain’s obsession
with nostalgia is one — but the place
has a distinctive character and its
residents like it. I suspect that,
without the fogeyish whims of Prince
Charles to satisfy, Fawley Waterside
might be even better.It is easy to poke
fun at the scheme
but I admire
its ambition
site put back on sale, Drummond told
a local newspaper that he felt it was
“imperative” for him to buy it.
He did exactly that, but not to
rebuild the family home. Instead, with
Krier’s guidance, he has devised an
ambitious plan to demolish the power
station and build a “smart town”
underpinned by superfast broadband,
yet housed in buildings that evoke the
elegant waterfronts of 18th-century
cities. To be called Fawley Waterside,
it will be home to about 3,500 people
when complete in perhaps 2026, and
also have a range of industries that
will, we are told, create 2,000 jobs.
Marine services will be prominent,
making use of the waterfront, butRichard Morrison the arts column
Plans to create a ‘smart town’ on the banks of the Solent are inspired
FAWLEY WATERSIDE LTD