Prince Charles gave no warning that he was about to abandon his usual restraint. He simply began slicing the air with his hands as his voice rose in frustration: "I had witnessed this appalling horror of the 1960s, when everything was thrown away, denigrated, abandoned. I watched as woods were cut down, hedges uprooted, wonderful old buildings knocked down. I minded dreadfully.
"My whole aim was to repair the damage, to heal the wounds, as it were, of the countryside." Calmer now, his voice falling to its usual hoarse whisper, he settled back in the silk armchair, smoothing his flawless blue suit. Meanwhile, the uniformed footman at Clarence House, the prince's London mansion, went about his business, sliding in and out of the drawing room.
One day Prince Charles, now 57, will be crowned king (his mother is already 80). Judging from the way he has handled his inheritance so far—more than 135,000 acres (54,633 hectares) of mostly rural land known as the Duchy of Cornwall—the country may be in for some surprises. He has used this private little kingdom as a place to test solutions to the problems of modernity, for the prince believes, fervently, that life in both town and country has gone awry.
"All my life," the prince said, "I have tried to break conventional molds because I think they are mistaken. The only way I could do it was through the duchy, to show there was an alternative way of looking at things."
And so just over 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."
With more than 650 houses now completed and another 1,600 to be built over the next 15 years, 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."
Clare Jenkins, a former chairperson of the Poundbury residents' association, lives with her husband, Mike, and their two young sons in an upmarket, four-bedroom, classically styled house looking toward the Iron Age hill fort of Maiden Castle. She and Mike started an IT-support company in a workshop within yards of the house. "I can walk to work," she said. "The kids can walk or cycle across the fields to school. However they have done the urban planning, it appears to have worked. There are no huge main roads. You walk to the local shop rather than drive to the big supermarket. There are no front gardens to hide behind and no big back gardens, so when the kids want to play, you go out to the fields and bump into more people. It makes a very different sense of community."
Unlike the conventional developments the prince so despises, Poundbury follows a design of almost unnerving boldness despite its cozy old-world atmosphere. Dotted with offices and several inconspicuous factories, it is densely packed, enabling many residents to walk to work, and its tight lanes and snaking avenues are meant to baffle motorists. "If you design with the pedestrian at the center, not the car," the prince said, "then you tend automatically to produce a more livable community."
Looking at the pretty facades of Poundbury's houses, you would never guess that as many as one in three is earmarked for people who can't afford open-market rents or purchase prices—reflecting Prince Charles's conviction that strong neighborhoods can best be fostered by mimicking the social and economic mix of a traditional village.
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."
At Highgrove, a reed bed is used to filter sewage from the main house, and the sheep, cattle, and pigs include an array of officially designated "rare breeds" forgotten by mainstream farmers. "The modern idea," the prince said, "was that you had to have ever more high-yielding animals. These traditional breeds are coming into their own because, of course, you don't want ever greater production, you want animals that are better quality, and you want animals that are better adapted to their local conditions. All this was being thrown away." The prince sees vindication in recent changes to the European Union's farm subsidies, which now emphasize environmental sustainability rather than output.
What Prince Charles has done, all in all, is turn his back on mainstream farming and land management, with their chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and antibiotics, to prove that a system more in tune with nature can be commercially viable. To rub in his point, he has gone on to create a successful range of goods, from organic jams to garden furniture, under the label Duchy Originals. The profits of around a million pounds a year go to his charities.
"In farming, as in gardening," the prince once wrote, "I happen to believe that if you treat the land with love and respect (in particular, respect for the idea that it has an almost living soul, bound up in the mysterious, everlasting cycles of nature) then it will repay you in kind." Evidence of that passionate belief is abundant at Home Farm, down to his organically grown carrots. "Those carrots are very special," he said ardently. "Just smell them. Absolutely marvelous."
Two decades ago when he began this crusade, many British farmers felt his experi- ments were a rebuke to their efficient modern methods. "He was publicly ridiculed. It was withering," recalled Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, the main organic growers body. But since then, the area in Britain farmed organically has increased more than a hundredfold. How much of that can be put down to Prince Charles and Highgrove? "I don't think it can be overestimated," Holden said. "He has emerged as the clear global leader of the sustainable agriculture movement, and rightly so."
The duchy, like any other landlord, could require its new tenants to farm organically. But instead, all duchy farmers are urged to commit to a series of environmental objectives for wild-life and native flora. Beyond that, when choosing new tenants, the duchy favors organic farmers on land it considers suitable.
The tenants seem to like the hands-off approach, and they respect the prince. "He understands about livestock. He understands farming because he's a farmer too," one dairyman said. Of dozens of tenants interviewed, only one refused to go on the record with his unflattering opinion (complaining about the prince's "fixation" with organic farming), fearing that if he were named as someone who spoke out against "Charlie boy," he might lose his home and farm. It was much more common to hear farmers, sitting in the privacy of their kitchens and warmed by a bottle or two of ale, comparing their lot with that of neighbors whose landlords don't give them free shooting rights, or repair their homes with obses- sive care for the historic fabric, or bother giving them Christmas presents.
Far down England's southwestern leg, Dartmoor is the biggest single lump of duchy land, covering more than 67,500 acres (27,316 hectares) of high, wild moor. On a Sunday in early September, a small group of farmers rode out through the early morning mist on the Chagford drift, one of several autumn roundups of Dartmoor ponies to bring in foals for branding and to gather surplus ponies for sale at local auctions. One of the men, riding a piebald horse, cracked a long leather whip above his head to mobilize the herd, while four others bucked ATVs across the pale tussock grass to head off breakaways.
When they had gathered about 50 of the half-wild ponies, the men drove them in a volatile mob down a narrow lane to Yardworthy Farm, near the village of Chagford. There, in the cold, gray farmyard, Sue Hutchings, whose 28-year-old son, Philip, had been on the drift, spoke of the pressures facing farmers. "Five years ago we would have brought in 100 ponies—how many were there today?" she asked rhetorically. "We have 25 of our own now, and we used to have 40. We keep them on because it's the tradition for our farmers."
These short-legged, tubby ponies—a rare breed—are promoted in the tourist industry as emblems of the moor. But in the 1980s the market for the ponies fell, in step with the fortunes of the nation's hill farmers. The breed's survival was further jeopardized by interbreeding with non-native ponies released on the moor. So some Dartmoor farmers, with the duchy's financial support, began a program to promote pure bloodlines. There's no profit in this for the duchy: It is driven by a sense of responsibility for Dartmoor and by Prince Charles's stubborn belief in the intrinsic value of traditional breeds.
"The prince worked here for a week with my husband's father—milking, building stone walls—when he wanted to learn what it was like for farmers," Sue said, her long brown hair blowing about in wisps. A close royal connection, however, does nothing to change the harsh economics of Yardworthy Farm. "We've just worked out that after expenses we literally make a pound fifty [$2.60] on a fattened bullock, if we're lucky. We made 20 pence on a sheep this year, if that. We always have a huge overdraft." At such rates of return, the family could sell its entire stock of 80 cattle and 800 sheep and make a profit of only $500.
For the Hutchings, there is no letup. Farm subsidies help, but Philip works almost every daylight hour, and Sue puts in a 35-hour week on the night shift at the local hospital, in addition to helping on the farm (full-time during the lambing season). Philip's brother, Ian, a builder, assists when he can, while Sue's husband, Wilf, 57, makes essential money building stone walls for other farmers.
When Sue and Wilf get too old for this grind, Philip will become the third-generation tenant at Yardworthy. Does he worry about the future? "I lose sleep over it," he answered quietly.
If it chose, the duchy could declare a short-term rent "holiday" for its hardest hit tenants, as in 2001, when foot-and-mouth disease devastated many farms. But this wouldn't solve the entrenched problems of agriculture. Instead, it has launched a "hill-farm initiative," aimed at promoting the sale of local produce by creating a new marketing brand. "All those upland areas are real challenges," the prince said. "I think the future lies in emphasizing the assets they have and trying to find a way of making the most of their local identity and characteristics. At one point there was a terrific sort of 'yo-ho' view that you should bring in go-ahead tenants who can show the locals how to farm properly. Somebody was brought down, and he rushed about on this farm on Dartmoor and after five years went completely belly-up because he tried to do things on the moor you simply cannot do. It taught me a lot about the need to respect the natural local conditions. If you try to kick nature in the teeth and push her too far, she will kick you back."
Prince Charles has urged tenants, through seminars and the land stewards, to try more lucrative enterprises than agriculture. Bed-and-breakfasts and holiday cottages have popped up all over the duchy estate, though not on Yardworthy. "We don't have any barns we can convert," Philip Hutchings said.
None of the Dartmoor tenants has given up yet. But if they do, the duchy has said it will not sell any vacant farms, even though city people would snap them up for millions of pounds.
In the 1800s the duchy leased its most isolated territory, the Isles of Scilly, some 30 miles (48 kilometers) off England's southwestern tip, to a banking heir from the mainland whose ambitious plans earned him the nickname Emperor. The experience left the Scillonians with little fondness for people (royal princes included) dictating to them from beyond their outpost.
"They don't like us at all," boomed Colin Sturmer, the land steward, who is based in Hugh Town, the only substantial settlement on the five main islands. "They've lived here for generations, and a lot of what you see is by their own hand. They've built their own houses, the land is managed by them, and to a large extent they've been viewed by mainlanders as just '2,000 drunks stuck to some rocks out in the Atlantic.'"
Looking around the landscape of white-sand beaches and tiny green fields bordered by hedges entwined with wildflowers, you see how wildly wrong that impression is.
"Why would you want to live anywhere else?" asked Chris Charlton, 37, a jet-boat skipper on the islet of St. Martin's. For the past six years, he has inhabited a corner of a friend's outdoor greenhouse—bare concrete floor, glass roof, no running water, no curtains to keep out the winter cold or summer heat. "I had a greenhouse thermometer by my bed that topped out at 50 Celsius [120 Fahrenheit], and it blew the top off it," he said, laughing.
"It's difficult because I want accommodation on the island, but I have to live somewhere here to qualify, so I've got to put up with this." Charlton estimated that there were ten other "shed dwellers"—typically single men from the mainland, like him—living unofficially on St. Martin's that summer.
Yes, Colin Sturmer said, the duchy's problems in the Scilly Isles come down to "housing, housing, and housing." Because it has had such a dominant role for so long, and still owns nearly a third of the residential property, many islanders (though not Charlton) automatically blame the shortage and out-of-reach rents on the duchy's greed. They may not know how constrained the duchy is. Many of the properties are under long leases, and today's planning laws—designed to protect the charm of the islands—restrict the building of houses. Nor does the government treasury readily allow the duchy to indulge in philanthropic gestures, such as fixing rents below the local market rate.
Sturmer loathes haggling with tenants over rents. He's much happier working on the duchy's initiatives: converting a quayside shed into an icehouse so local fishermen can freeze their catch cheaply; helping with the marketing of locally grown narcissi; encouraging farmers to graze their cattle on the headlands, which allows native flowers to flourish.
But even these efforts don't tamp down the simmering hostility, inflamed recently when the duchy rented two of its 340 island properties as holiday cottages, each earning up to $3,000 a week, easily ten times the rent a Scillonian would pay. "The prince goes on about affordable housing," a local boatman said. "It's just hypocrisy. Don't quote me, though—most of my business comes from the duchy." The duchy regards the income from the cottages as a necessary extra return on the investment it makes in the islands' infrastructure.
What does Prince Charles make of the housing situation? "Many of the people on the Isles of Scilly," he replied, "have lived there for generations, and it matters to me desperately that they continue to do so. The duchy recognizes the problem of affordability and has provided a number of affordable homes for local people in addition to twenty houses for key workers. But more needs to be done, and that is why we are working to build new affordable homes."
Soon enough, Prince Charles will assume his mother's duties, and such questions will face the next Duke of Cornwall, Prince William, who is now 23.
"I have been trying to create more of a family feeling about the duchy, so that it becomes a slightly more personal exercise," the prince said. It is no exaggeration that Prince Charles has done more for—and with—the duchy in 40 years than all his forebears in nearly 700. His deepest hope now is that William will carry on his vision, strengthening the relationship he has worked to forge with the tenants.
"I just love the idea of my son continuing with them," the prince said, speaking so softly he was nearly drowned out by the Clarence House clocks chiming the hour.