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Duchy of Cornwall
MAY 2006
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Experiment in Ways Gone By
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Legacy of heirs to the British throne since 1337, the Duchy of Cornwall is more than 135,000 acres (55,000 hectares) of mostly rural land. Today Prince Charles uses this private kingdom as a place to test solutions to the problems that modernity, he believes, have brought to town and country. A little more than a decade ago, on 400 acres (162 hectares) owned by the Duchy of Cornwall since the 14th century, ground was broken for a new village.
Situated on the western edge of Dorchester, a Roman-era market town in the lush county of Dorset, Poundbury is Prince Charles's dream made real, his answer to the "unadulterated ugliness and mediocrity" of typical housing estates and the "heartlessness of so much urban planning."
Poundbury's architecture borrows from the quaint cottages found in Dorset and doffs its hat to grander 18th-century houses in Dorchester. All the buildings are faced with time-tested local materials, such as honey-colored hamstone, with the aim of helping the community take root in a familiar atmosphere.
"What I was trying to do," the prince said, "was remind people about the pointlessness of throwing away all the knowledge and experience and wisdom—wisdom—of what had gone before."
Home Farm, encompassing 1,060 acres (429 hectares) near Highgrove House in bucolic Gloucestershire, is to country as Poundbury is to town, the seedbed for the prince's ideas about sustainable agriculture.
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