He admits that Poundbury is an expensive experiment, launched in the face of opposition from architects, planners, and economists. The high costs followed inevitably from his determination to avoid the mass-produced materials that give a dreary, uniform look. In Poundbury even the curbs are granite rather than the usual concrete blocks.
"It very nearly didn't end up like it is now because there were efforts to water it down," the prince said. "But we have probably shown that for a ten percent extra cost, roughly, you are actually achieving a far higher value in the longer term than the shorter term, which is the way the modern world looks at everything."
Indeed, Poundbury is so successful that it has spawned smaller versions of itself elsewhere in the duchy, and a bigger version is set to rise next to the Cornish town of Newquay. There the prince plans to incorporate, along with his "Poundbury principles" of design, advanced strategies for environmental sustainability, such as rainwater harvesting and geothermal technology. Experience gained at Poundbury should help. "It took a long time to wear down the public utility people to have one common trench for water, electricity, and gas," he said. "That was more difficult than you would believe possible. It means you don't have to dig up the road every five minutes—and, you know, one common satellite dish means you don't have to have these things stuck all over everything like a rash."
The prince's hope that his vision will shape urban living beyond the duchy seems to be coming true. The British government has embraced the Poundbury principles, and last year curious city planners and high officials from numerous countries, including the United States, walked Poundbury's streets. "Saudi Arabia is now going to come and have a look as a result of my encouraging," the prince said.
Prince Charles's duchy legacy stretches back a long way. On March 17, 1337, after "anxious meditation," King Edward III declared that his eldest son, the Black Prince, must henceforth enjoy an income worthy of an heir to the throne. So the king granted some of his castles, manors, and hamlets—largely in the counties of Devon and Cornwall—to his son, along with a spiffy new title: the Duke of Cornwall.
Most of the dukes left the tenants and lands alone. Not Prince Charles, who oversees the estate's work to an astonishing degree. His 72-strong duchy staff has learned not to build any new cottage, or fell an acre of woodland, without first seeking the royal nod. He sends Bertie Ross, his chief executive (officially, the Secretary and Keeper of the Records), a constant flow of detailed notes, handwritten in ink, with ideas or queries. But the day-to-day work of dealing with duchy projects and tenants is left to the staff, spread between the head office in London and four regional outposts managed by land stewards. They are long-serving men—all men—who have absorbed the thinking of "the boss" so deeply that most of them at times slip into his distinctive strangulated voice.
The duchy provides the prince's entire annual income—13.2 million pounds (23.5 million dollars) in 2004—which covers most of the cost of his official duties, his charitable activities, and all his private expenses. It is money that comes as rent from roughly 250 tenanted farms and from, among many other sources, transatlantic undersea fiber-optic cables and a gay bar in London. The only real curb on the prince, aside from easily roused British public opinion, is the government's treasury department, charged by law with ensuring that management of the duchy finances safeguards the interests of future Dukes of Cornwall.
Home farm, encompassing 1,060 acres (429 hectares) near Highgrove House in bucolic Gloucestershire, is to country as Poundbury is to town. Highgrove is the place Prince Charles considers his real home, and the farm is the seedbed for his ideas about sustainable agriculture.
If you had stopped by last autumn, on the drizzly day he hosted the annual National Hedgelaying Championships, you could have seen him, dressed in a pink open-neck shirt under an old tweed jacket patched up with leather, hacking away at a tall hawthorn hedge and binding its tough stems into stock-proof fencing. He hadn't planned to practice his own skills at hedge laying when so many professionals were demonstrating their prowess farther along the hedge line, but he just couldn't stop himself. For the prince, the exercise is potent magic: It combines traditional craftsmanship with caring for a vulnerable landscape feature.
Elsewhere at Highgrove, you might have seen other curiosities, perhaps the prince's own pair of giant Suffolk punch draft horses, Duke and Emperor, hauling a hand-steered plow. He encourages the use of horses in the duchy to drag timber from steep woodlands that might be damaged by the wheels of heavy vehicles.
"It's a working farm—it's not meant to be a showpiece," said David Wilson, the manager of Home Farm, hurrying off on his stork-like legs to check two quar- antined calves suffering from ringworm. In their barn he had tied a bunch of holly twigs to a beam above their heads, like a get-well bouquet. "It's a folk remedy," Wilson said. "They say it works, We will give anything a try."
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