‘This is the street we took the Queen up,’ Conibear said. (‘It was a bit like a mother inspecting her son’s school project,’ one resident told me later.) Around every corner there’s a financial services bureau or a place offering private healthcare (holistic, palliative, meditative). There is a pub, the Poet Laureate, alongside many specialist shops – blinds, bikes, bridal. The biggest industry in Poundbury is the Dorset Cereals muesli factory on the north-east edge, but this has chosen to remove Poundbury from its address, preferring the less exact but more romantic Dorchester. There were many beautiful buildings but no set style; the stonework and designs (everything from neo-Georgian to Victorian townhouse to a barn conversion) had been lifted from the most picturesque dwellings in Dorset’s other villages and grouped together to form, ideally, something that was even more picturesque. Poundbury folk didn’t take kindly to my suggestion that their new place of residence looked like a film set from The Mayor of Casterbridge; it’s not always this quiet, they said, not when the football-mad kids get home from school (not that they’re allowed to kick a ball against anyone’s front wall). And it wasn’t really that quiet anyway, because bulldozers and cement mixers were at work in the distance, building a second phase.
Simon Conibear then took me to the House of Dorchester chocolate factory, and he said, ‘If you go around the back, you can get what I call droppings for £1.20 a bag.’ I asked him about the Poundbury rules. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘We run it as a sort of draconian conservation area and people like that. They know that the area is not going to be disfigured.’ The houses we pass cost from £150,000 to £350,000. The place names – Evershot Walk, Longmore Street, Pummery Square – are named after Duchy estate properties, such as farms. The prince is always consulted. There is one glaring exception: Brownsword Hall, the main focal point, is named after Andrew Brownsword, the man from Hallmark cards who stumped up the money for it.
A few crunchy footsteps from the hall lies the Octagon café, purveyors of fine coffee and panini. The owners Clay and Mary have sunk their life savings into the place and they are proud of the comments in their visitors’ book. ‘Really nice cakes,’ one entry says, ‘and comfy settees!’
At one table near the door, Lilian Hart and Rosemary Warren, both retired, were discussing Poundbury’s progress. Mrs Warren and her husband were the first people to own a house here, while Mrs Hart and her husband were the second, moving in during January 1995. They adore it, not least the location. ‘I can drive to the supermarket and be parked and shopping within four minutes, five at the most,’ Mrs Hart said, perhaps slightly more concerned with speed and time economy than the architects of her town had intended. ‘I can be at a hospital in two and a half minutes and within 30 seconds I’m in the country. I wanted a new house. At my age I don’t want to be doing any maintenance – and it’s beautifully insulated.’ Both women wished there was an easier route to the airport because, like a lot of Poundbury folk, they usually fly away somewhere warm for the winter. And they’d like a little grocery store and a post office.
‘But I have only one severe criticism,’ Mrs Hart said. ‘We have a playground across from us and it’s not big enough. And it’s in the wrong place.’ She mentioned this to the Duchy people and heard back that there were ‘rumours’ that it would move. ‘Prince Charles does take an interest in our views,’ Mrs Warren said. ‘When my husband died, he sent me a note.’
Other views met with less enthusiasm. Not much point complaining about the gravel, for instance, as Sue McCarthy-Moore did. ‘I have two teenage daughters who are always treading it into the house,’ she told me. The gravel is the colour of camels, a cheaper alternative to cobbles and more attractive than tarmac. It is almost everywhere in Poundbury and has the attraction of making everyone audible as they walk around, which helps with the neighbourhood watch.
And then there are other, bigger problems. Jonathan Glancey, the former architecture critic of the Guardian, believed ‘it doesn’t really work on any level. It’s overwrought. You have to be gentle and loose with new buildings but there’s been far too much effort put into it. The streets feel too wide because, unlike the old villages which inspired it, any new place is built with strict regulations that must allow those huge fire engines through.’
Clearly, it is easier to build model houses than a model community, no matter how many stringent rules and ethical codes its citizens enforce. ‘Prince Charles’s vision would incorporate men on every corner turning the leg of a chair on a lathe,’ Glancey told me. ‘But the reality is that people are upstairs in their bedroom furtively downloading who-knows-what from the Internet.’
I returned to Poundbury ten years after my first visit, and another five years after that. In 2016 it is still an intriguing place, and in many ways an admirable one. The vision remains consistent, the place appears to be working socially (it’s not the ghost town some had feared), and the popularity of the concept means that the building is still ongoing. There were now about 2,500 inhabitants, about halfway to its target, the junior school is expanding, and the bulldozers and diggers are still on the outskirts, and the outskirts are edging ever closer to Dorchester. People like what they see, and what they don’t, and they are still moving in from far-flung English outposts where things, in their estimation, have not worked out so well. You still come to Poundbury because you don’t like the speed at which the world is changing, Little England for the UKIP age. The panic button is always close to hand, and the fire engines of the drawing board are now a reality: a huge fire station is now an unmissable feature of the town, reportedly based on a design by the prince himself. Like Poundbury as a whole, it has gained the usual fervent dichotomy of opinion: the locals generally approve, while the purists smirk. Clocking its Georgian grandeur garlanded in drains, the editor of the architecture and design magazine Icon called it ‘the Parthenon meets Brookside’, and suggested that the firefighters ‘should be forced to wear Regency breeches and powdered wigs, and rush to their infernos in a red barouche carrying water in wooden pails’. Meanwhile, a reader of the Daily Mail, responding to photos in the newspaper, judged it ‘much better than the modern tat inflicted on us in city centres!!!’1
Even in his most halcyon cups, Prince Charles must have realised that Poundbury would not be to everyone’s taste. Indeed, its idiosyncrasy is part of its appeal. It’s certainly not to my taste, but I would always take its vaulted ambition over the generic alternative of the little-boxes estate. The strangest thing of all about it is that, while its future is firmly rooted in the past, there is also something rather forward-thinking about its notion of the good life. In the late 1980s, when Poundbury was first mooted, the West’s devotion to greed, speed and the aspirational whirlwind appeared limitless. With the social and environmental cost yet to be factored, and the economy yet to Belgrano, many could see no downside to it. But these days the notion (if not the reality) of Poundbury dovetails with the wider pursuit of a different sort of life. Something calmer and less frantic, with room for pensiveness and a re-evaluation of purpose. One sees it in mindfulness, in hit books devoted to colouring, woodchopping and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, in the elevation of crafting and making, in a longer-term consideration of the environment, in popular lifestyle magazines named Kinfolk and Oak and Hole & Corner with their precious emphasis on wooden spoon-making and design from Scandinavia, and even in the fanatical devotions of the urban barista. Although disparate in display, and ripe for parody, these forces are unwittingly banded together in what has become known as the slow living movement and the new crafts movement; not so much a rejection of everything connected with speed, but a way of living that embraces things more meaningful than instant gratification and the pursuit of the quick fix. In the book The Kinfolk Home, for example, which is subtitled Interiors for Slow Living, the editors Nathan Williams and Katie Searle-Williams explain that ‘Slow living is less of a style and more of a deeply personal mentality . . . Slow living isn’t about determining how little we can
live with – it’s about working out what we can’t live without.’ The goal is not idleness, but pleasure through care and patience. (One other notable aspect of slow living is how often the attempt to describe it begins by describing what it is not.) As with Poundbury, the movement is an easy thing to parody and deride. Advocates of the slow life may be regarded as narcissistic, backward-looking, smug and incredibly annoying. Is the whole thing anything more than sterile romanticism? The worst insult of all is that its chief practitioners offer middle-class solutions to first-world problems. But some parts of the movement are also concerned with matters beyond the local availability of kale and chia seeds, aware that at least one element of slow living already equates the pursuit of simple pleasure with the politics of sustainability, health security and the entire continuous wealth of nations. In other words, what began as a desire for nice architecture and a gentler pace of life is increasingly looking like a viable way to save both our souls and the planet.
ii) Living Frenchly
Chez Panisse, one of the historic culinary landmarks of California, does not, at first glance, have a great deal in common with Poundbury. The weather outside is kinder, for one thing, and there is a more respectful attitude towards the French. But the founding principles are not so far removed, and they both share a distaste for the homogeneity of modern life. Besides, their respective founders are firm and long-term friends, with Prince Charles a great fan not only of Chez Panisse the restaurant, but also a great many of the political and social objectives to which its owner aspires.
Chez Panisse was established by a woman named Alice Waters in Berkeley in 1971. After chaotic beginnings and multiple crises, the restaurant earned a reputation as the epicentre of American slow food, and Waters became an unlikely champion of all that later became known as ‘farm-to-table’, with all its attendant core values: seasonal produce, local production, minimal use of pesticides and artificial fertilisers, nothing genetically modified, everything sustainable. The catchword, before it became a dirty word, was artisanal.
Waters was born in New Jersey, but she came of age in mid-1960s Berkeley at the time of free love and free speech; she channels that part of the counterculture that tried to change the world rather than the one that dropped out. She is most frequently described as ‘elfin’, and usually as indomitable. The writer Adam Gopnik has described her as ‘the kind of American woman who a century ago would have been storming through saloons with a hatchet and is now steaming fresh green beans, but with similar motives’.
To Waters, slow food was a mood board: it had little to do with the length a pot stayed on the stove, because a plate of allotment heirloom tomatoes would fit the manifesto just as well. It was all about eating with integrity, and buying with respect for provenance. It was about eating the way we think our parents used to eat, or would have eaten, had they not too been always rushed off their feet.
In 2004, at Alice Waters’s request, Prince Charles spoke at a conference organised by the slow food movement in Turin. He too had a definition. ‘Slow food is traditional food,’ he said at the conference, which was called Terra Madre (Mother Earth).
It is also local – and local cuisine is one of the most important ways we identify with the place and region where we live. It is the same with the buildings in our towns, cities and villages. Well-designed places and buildings that relate to locality and landscape and that put people before cars enhance a sense of community and rootedness. All these things are connected. We no more want to live in anonymous concrete blocks that are just like anywhere else in the world than we want to eat anonymous junk food which can be bought anywhere. At the end of the day, values such as sustainability, community, health and taste are more important than pure convenience.
The prince believed that the importance of the slow food movement cannot be overstated. ‘That is, after all, why I am here . . . to remind people as John Ruskin in the nineteenth century did, back in England, that “industry without art is brutality”.’
‘Representatives from 151 countries were present at that, and everybody was sceptical about him coming and speaking,’ Alice Waters told me, ‘but they all stood up at the end.’ It was clear from the speech that the slow food movement lies at the heart of the slow living movement. It still may be best described by what it is not: it is not purely about food. It is not even particularly middle class. It has its roots in left-leaning politics and community welfare, and its dawn in north-west Italy speaks of a deeply traditional radicalism fused with a particularly agricultural conservatism.
The ‘slow food manifesto’ was published in November 1987, although by then its ideology had already been chewed over and digested for many years, principally in the Piedmontese town of Bra. The manifesto was written by the author and poet Folco Portinari, and stated that the world had been infested ‘by the virus of fast life’, and criticised those who ‘can’t tell the difference between efficiency and frenzy’. The biggest loss, the manifesto claimed, was the pursuit of pleasure; the joy had gone from the table, which meant that the delight had vanished from life. One galvanising force, as so often with food protests, was the imminent arrival the year before of a McDonald’s, in this case near the Spanish Steps in Rome. But it was another unhappy meal in 1982 that inspired a man named Carlo Petrini to wonder whether the price we were paying for mediocre and soulless food served up with the guiding principle of speed of preparation was not, after all, too high.
According to Geoff Andrews, author of The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure, Petrini and a group of friends were in Montalcino, Tuscany, when they called in for lunch at the town’s Casa del Popolo, the workers’ social club. They found the food filthy and cold, and, on returning home to Bra, Petrini wrote an open letter declaring his horror. The food was an insult to the region, and an insult to the region’s fine wine. His letter drew both support and ridicule, the latter from those who thought that Petrini, a local councillor with a history of cultural radicalism, should busy himself with more important things than a disappointing lunch. There was much to be radical about: it was the beginning of the era of Italian aspirational hedonism that gave rise to Berlusconi. Petrini argued that there may be nothing as important as food: not so much the chilly pasta he was served in a bowl, more what it represented – a rushed job that disrespected tradition and dishonoured local producers. And thus the central tenet of slow food was formed, a movement that now spans 450 regional chapters in 150 countries and claims more than 100,000 members. In the three decades since it was formed its manifesto has matured from polemic to practicalities. Among its current goals: establishing an ‘Ark of Taste’ log for each area to record and protect locally grown produce; encouraging local processing and slaughtering; supporting local farms; warning against the health dangers of fast food, such as diabetes and malnutrition; lobbying against food miles and genetic engineering. The movement was defensively protectionist, but its commitment to sustainability made it forward-thinking too. The way many of those in the West will first experience the effects of climate change, for example, will be through a shortage of certain types of food, while the transporting of produce will have made a small contribution to the rate of climate change in the first place.
In his Terra Madre speech in Turin, Prince Charles mentioned Eric Schlosser’s pioneering book Fast Food Nation. ‘The extraordinary centralization and industrialization of our food system has occurred over as little as twenty years,’ Charles noted.2 ‘Fast food may appear to be cheap food, and in the literal sense it often is. But that is because huge social and environmental costs are being excluded from the calculations.’ The prince listed a few of the costs: the rise in food-borne illnesses; the advent of new pathogens such as E. coli 0157; antibiotic resistance from the overuse of drugs in animal feed; extensive water pollution from intensive agricultural systems. ‘These costs are not reflected in the price of fast food, but that doesn’t mean that our society isn’t paying them.’
Alice Waters became aware of the sl
ow food movement when she first heard Carlo Petrini speak in San Francisco in the late 1980s. ‘I heard what he had to say and I guess we just fell into each other’s arms. It was very exciting to me.’ She became an international vice-president of the movement and began her campaigning journey, but food with an appetite for politics was preceded in Waters’s life by something simpler – a love of food alone. Her initial passion for gastronomy had a rich and predictable source, and sauce: the cuisine of France. She first visited in 1965 and it was here that the idea for her own local bistro was born. She liked both the myth and reality of the French table: the mood of maternal warmth, the understanding that wine is a mandatory part of every meal, and the feeling that no one seems particularly eager to return to work after lunch. ‘When I came back from that trip I was just in shock to be back in this fast-food culture,’ she told me. She resolved to live as Frenchly as possible; she wanted nothing less than to re-enchant the world. She had also fallen for French couture and the joie de vivre of the 1930s films of Marcel Pagnol. (These films were virtually a country of their own, where coastal time – the setting is Marseille – is counted in units of love and bonhomie and provincial comical tiffs. One character in these films was named Panisse, and another was Fanny, the name Waters gave her daughter.)
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