Читать книгу The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail - Penny Junor - Страница 7
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Thick early morning fog had slowly lifted and given way to a sunny but cold autumn morning in the English county of Dorset. The countryside was looking glorious, at its green and pleasant best, as I headed for the experimental new town of Poundbury; the leaves on the trees were the colour of rich orange marmalade. It was the perfect day to witness a rare event. The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were to visit the town where Charles has implemented all his unorthodox ideas about urban planning. It’s not often that you see the four senior members of the British Royal Family on a public engagement together – and it’s almost unprecedented for the Prince’s parents to visit and thereby tacitly endorse one of his achievements.
Poundbury is undeniably an extraordinary achievement, one which has been in the making for nearly a quarter of a century. Charles was hoping to impress his parents, but after a lifetime of disappointment in that hope, he was not holding his breath. The Prince of Wales has been trying to win his parents’ approval his entire life, but he is not the son his father wanted – he is way too sensitive – and he has never felt he was good enough, never felt he came up to their expectations, never felt truly loved or appreciated. The Queen has many wonderful qualities and as a sovereign she has been peerless, but she is not emotionally demonstrative – and the Duke, for all his talents, is a bully. Charles grew up with everything he could want materially, but very few of his emotional needs were satisfied, and no amount of wealth and privilege can make up for the damage of that early emotional deprivation. The only person who made him feel good about himself, until Camilla came along, was his grandmother, the Queen Mother, who died in 2002 at the age of 101. And he was here today to officially open the central square that he has named after her.
Charles has put heart and soul into Poundbury. He has gone against accepted wisdom and practice, and for all the years of contempt and ridicule he has been proved right. The buildings in Queen Mother Square are designed for mixed use, all neoclassical in design – one bears a striking resemblance to Buckingham Palace – and most are named after the Queen Mother’s favourite racehorses. After a tour of some of the buildings, and some speeches, the Queen was to unveil a bronze statue of her mother that stands imposingly, three metres high, in the centre of the square.
I parked my car in a field, the designated car park for the day, and made my way on foot through long wet grass and stinging nettles to the centre of Poundbury, a five-minute walk away. I was two hours early but the square was already full of police and well-wishers, hundreds of them, a crowd that would swell to thousands. Since it was half-term, excitable children had joined parents and grandparents, all of them wrapped up against the cold. When the royal convoy finally arrived, the spectators were standing six deep and more behind crowd barriers, waving flags and taking photos on their mobile phones. This was a day that they would remember for many years to come. The family is not normally seen together other than at weddings and funerals, at Christmas and Easter, when they all go to church, or on ceremonial occasions, like Remembrance Day and Trooping the Colour on the Queen’s official birthday. With the Queen and the Duke now both in their nineties, there are no guarantees that these four will share an event again.
The centre had been cordoned off and security was tight – sniffer dogs would have been round earlier and there were no doubt snipers on the roofs – but everyone was good-natured and jovial. They usually are when royalty comes to the countryside. The Royal Family is in the feel-good business; it is important that security is never too heavy-handed.
The town feels like no other I have ever visited. I was last there in 2004, when I was given a guided tour by the development manager; it has more than doubled in size since then and still has two more phases to go. It is not to everyone’s taste, but I have to confess I was impressed. Charles set out to challenge the reliance on cars that had dictated most urban planning of recent decades, where shops were mostly built in one out-of-town zone, industry in another, and residential in yet another. This has meant the car is not an option for most people but a necessity. Poundbury also set out to challenge the belief that if you put rich and poor alongside one another, it automatically depresses house prices.
Here humans triumph over cars. As I discovered on my first visit, you can’t drive at much more than a crawl if there is no knowing who has priority. And it is one big social mix, so there are no rich enclaves and no poor ghettos. Thirty-five per cent of the housing is social, but you would scarcely know from looking at it – so tenants tend to take pride in their homes and look after them. And residential buildings are mixed up with businesses, factories, shops, pubs, restaurants, schools and leisure facilities – in the way that communities that grew organically once were – so that no one needs to get into their car to go about their daily life. Cars are banished to courtyards behind the houses and pedestrians take precedence in the streets; it’s safe for children to walk on their own to school or play outside their front doors, and employment is on the doorstep. It’s a town where there are fountains, flowers, trees, grass and water features, but no street furniture or road markings, no visible satellite dishes and no telephone wires. The buildings are unashamedly traditional, with chimneys for open fires and tasteful front doors; they’re a hotchpotch of different designs and sizes, some detached, some terraced, with space and walkways between them, with everything on a human scale.
What I found most remarkable about Poundbury, though, was the vision of the man – and the bravery. He swam against a torrent of opposition to put his ideas into practice. They were deeply controversial ideas and the whole massive project could have gone catastrophically wrong. The social housing experiment might not have worked, the factories might have created problems, or they could have had a jobsworth of a planning officer who insisted on bollards, road markings and standard street lighting. But they didn’t. His critics have mocked it – they’ve called it ‘toy-town’, a ‘retro-kitsch fantasia’. Taxi drivers call it ‘Charlesville’. But for all the sniping, it’s now a thriving community of three thousand people, over two thousand of them in work. Crime is low, accidents are few and house prices are buoyant. What’s more, it’s had a major impact on urban planning, and not just in the UK. Council engineers, traffic experts, highways officials, architects, developers and planners arrive by the coachload from all over the world to look and learn from the experiment.
Charles has been an outspoken critic of modern architecture since the early 1980s, famously calling one high-profile project – the proposed extension to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square – ‘a kind of vast municipal fire station … like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’. That design was scrapped and over the years, contracts on other major projects have also been cancelled after his intervention. He has divided opinion as a result, both amongst architects and the public. He’s been accused of abusing his position – a common refrain about the Prince of Wales – of being unconstitutional, a cranky elitist, and for setting himself up as an authority on a subject he knows nothing about. So when in 1987 Dorchester District Council first talked about requisitioning 400 acres of open farmland belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall, owned by the Prince, for an extension to the town, it was an opportunity for him to put his money where his mouth was.
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the project eighteen years ago, five years into phase one. They were there for twenty minutes, without the Prince, and offered him no opinion, either good or bad, after the visit. But it was early days, with only 500 people living there; maybe this was too early for them to offer an opinion. This time around, they surely would. Whatever their views on the style of architecture, you would think they must be fiercely proud of Poundbury and all of the Prince of Wales’s achievements.
This time his parents spent longer in Poundbury; they were there for seventy minutes. The family group had travelled from London on the royal train to Dorchester, where they were met by the Lord Lieutenant in all his finery, and by cheering crowds. They then travelled in a convoy the few miles to Poundbury, the Queen and Duke in her specially adapted Bentley which carries on its roof her crest and the Royal Standard, the Prince and Duchess following in a Rolls Royce. All four got out of their respective cars and were into a civic line-up before a tour of the main buildings. First was a branch of Waitrose, the upmarket supermarket chain that sells the Prince’s organic produce under the Duchy label, where they were each presented with hampers, then on to a reception in the Jubilee Hall, then to the Royal Pavilion to meet the architects and hear Charles explain the development. Next, a fleeting look at The Duchess of Cornwall, the pub that he has named in his wife’s honour, and onto the dais for the formal bit and the unveiling. Andrew Hamilton, the development director, spoke first, praising the Prince’s vision in challenging the accepted orthodoxy of planning and development in the UK.
Then the Prince spoke, his voice unusually croaky. He had a bad cold but it may also have been nerves. He is never easy around his parents: ‘It is a great honour Your Majesty is able to be with us today,’ he began before listing all those to whom he was indebted for helping him turn his dream into a reality. Then he invited his mother to unveil the statue in memory of his ‘darling Grandmother’ and to declare her Square open.
If either of his parents were proud, it wasn’t immediately obvious. For most of the ceremony there was not a hint of a smile, not an admiring look; they might have been sitting with strangers. Only when the cloth cover was successfully off the statue did the group show any animation or chat to one another, but it was brief. Then, after greeting a handful of the people who had waited so patiently for this moment, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh prepared to leave. As he got into the car, the Duke put his hands together a couple of times by way of a congratulatory clap to his son and said, ‘Well done.’ It was as rare as it was unexpected. His only other remark was that there was no echo in one of the rooms they’d been in. His mother smiled but offered nothing.
And so it has been throughout his childhood and his adult life. If he has a successful foreign tour, visits Tottenham after the riots, or offers comfort at a disaster scene, he hears nothing; if he makes a good speech, or launches an interesting initiative, there is silence. The last time the Queen and Duke showed any public interest in anything he has done was in 2012. During the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee tour of the country, the Prince’s office had an unexpected call from Buckingham Palace to say that she and the Duke would like to visit the north country town of Burnley, once the world centre of the cotton industry, where six of the Prince’s charities have worked hard to revitalise the town. They wondered whether the Prince might join them. When Charles was told he thought there must be some mistake. ‘The Queen wants to visit my project in Burnley? That can’t be right.’
The person who has given Charles the courage and the encouragement to do half of the things he has done in the last few decades is Camilla, and whether she will be called Queen or Princess Consort is immaterial. What matters is that, finally, he feels loved and supported by someone close.
