BY RICHARD MORRISON

COLUMN FOR FRIDAY AUG 7

FIRST STORY

In southern England an aristocratic landowner vows to build a new community for several thousand
people on land his family has owned for centuries. No fan of high-rise towers and brutalist concrete,
he hires the architect Leon Krier – the “father of new urbanism” and an outspoken critic of
modernism – to mastermind this new town and make it look as if it has been there for ever.

Trendy architecture critics queue up to put a supercilious boot into what they regard as a deeply
regressive project. “Fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute,” writes “style guru” Stephen
Bayley. A few, however, offer a more balanced view. “The place is neither anachronistic, nor
utopian, nor elitist,” writes the Canadian architecture guru Witold Rybczynski, after spending six
days in the place. 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 land owned
by the Duchy of Cornwall just outside Dorchester in Dorset. Or am I? Because history is about to
repeat itself – or perhaps, since we are talking about a place designed by revisiting historical styles,
re-repeat itself.

Again an aristocratic landowner is aiming to build an entire new community on land his family has
owned for centuries. Again Krier, now 74, has been hired to mastermind the project. 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 put together by a committee comprising John Betjeman and Andrea Palladio.

The aristocrat is Aldred Drummond, a property developer whose ancestors include two 14 th-century
Scottish queens and whose family has owned the Cadland Estate on the shores of the Solent in
Hampshire for 240 years. Back in 1953, however – well before Drummond was born - a compulsory
purchase order resulted in the family’s ancestral home being demolished, and a chunk of its
shoreline being 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 the land put back up for sale, Drummond told a local newspaper that he felt it
was “imperative” for him to buy back the land.

He did exactly did, but not to rebuild the family home. Instead, with Krier’s guidance, he has devised
an incredibly ambitious plan to demolish the power station and build a “smart town”, underpinned
by the most advanced technology and superfast broadband available, yet housed in buildings that
evoke the elegant waterfronts of 18 th-century cities. To be called Fawley Waterside, it will be home
to about 3,500 people when complete in perhaps 2026, plus a range of industries that will, we are
told, create 2,000 jobs.
Of those, marine services will be prominent, making use of the extended waterfront, but there’s also
talk of the place being “a testbed for cutting-edge smart technology”. Drummond himself has floated
the perhaps slightly fanciful vision of the Solent becoming the “UK’s San Francisco Bay”.

It’s easy to poke fun at the plans, and some are already doing so – deriding the references in Fawley
Waterside’s prospectus to cobbled streets and 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,” writes one correspondent in last week’s Architects’ Journal.

And it’s true that the project does have a kind of instant historicism built into it. The heart of the
new town , for instance, will apparently be called the Heart of the Town. And although the
prospectus promises “a rich variety of architectural style”, I doubt that this variety will encompass
anything that wouldn’t have been approved by, say, Ruskin in 1880.

And yet I admire the scheme: the singlemindedness of it, the ambition, the attention to detail, the
respect for context (part of it will sit inside the New Forest National Park) – and, most of all, the fact
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 urban developments in the
late 20th century were imposed on ordinary people by architects and town planners in thrall to
theoretical ideas that looked very clever on paper, but which proved disastrously inhumane when
applied in real life.

In Britain, if we can just get through this ghastly pandemic, we will be embarking on an era of new-
town building not seen since the 1950s, and 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 for nostalgia is one of them – but the place has a distinct
character and its residents like it. I suspect that, without the fogeyish whims of Prince Charles to
satisfy, Fawley Waterside might be even better.

SECOND STORY

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”.
Asked what he would look for in a future spouse, he answers “devotion to her husband”. And asked
to state his idea of happiness, he replies “Absolute power over men’s minds, even if accompanied by
chronic toothache”.

Anyone who attended Oxford University any time in the past 900 years will probably have
encountered an undergraduate as insufferable as that. Sadly, only one of them grew up to be Oscar
Wilde.