Battles royal: how Charles has influenced British architecture

It is the evening of 30 May 1984. The country’s leading architects have assembled at Hampton Court to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the body that represents their interests, the RIBA. It is a sea of black polo necks, masculine chit-chat and clinked glasses. Given that the ‘R’ in RIBA stands for ‘Royal’ – albeit an honour actually awarded by William IV in 1837, three years after the Institute of British Architects’ founding – it is perhaps no surprise that a royal has been drafted in to politely murmur some congratulations over dinner. Yet what happened next was most certainly not expected.

With no warning, the man who was then Prince Charles – now King Charles III – launched into an attack which eviscerated modern architecture. His most famous line – in which he described the competition-winning design for an extension to the National Gallery, by the well-regarded firm of Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, as a ‘monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’ – sent shockwaves through the profession and led to such a rapid U-turn by the Trafalgar Square institution that Nelson must have been pirouetting on his pillar. (The extension was later built, in a sort of inoffensive post-modern-meets-neo-classical style, by Venturi, Scott Brown, after a new competition.)

Architects immediately denounced the speech as some sort of stab in the front – after all, it was their birthday and they’d cry if they wanted to. And the media had a field day. I recall the gentle former Times correspondent, Charles Knevitt, telling me how he sprinted off to find the only public telephone in Hampton Court in order to call his editor, only to have to wrestle it from his opposite number at the Telegraph who had beaten him to it. It may have been the last time that architecture pundits engaged in a spot of physical violence.

But the carbuncle speech was not the last time that Charles intervened to the detriment of the profession’s big beasts. When he objected to Richard Rogers’ plans for the former Chelsea Barracks site in Central London in 2009, he wrote to the Qatari owners – royal-a-royal – to have the scheme scrapped. The resulting row ended up in the High Court, but the Rogers masterplan was duly squashed, prompting the late Labour peer to exclaim: ‘Charles knows little about architecture. He sees this debate as a battle of the styles, which is against the run of history because architecture evolves and moves, mirroring society.’ It was the culmination of a lifelong enmity between the pair.

He hasn’t always been successful in spiking designs he hated, though. Sadly even he proved unable to get Jean Nouvel’s grotty design for the shopping centre next to St Paul’s stopped, despite pestering the taste-deaf owners, Land Securities; One New Change has to be one of the worst modern developments in the capital and looks to be perpetually in need of a hard scrub. Maybe with dynamite.

But whatever your constitutional position on a prince of the blood intervening in public planning decisions, you have to concede that Charles has always been ready to put the Duchy of Cornwall’s money where his mouth is. Nowhere was this more evident than at Poundbury – the village he created on the outskirts of Dorchester in Dorset, starting in 1987. Designed to showcase some of the ideas he espoused in that first speech to the RIBA – notably the value of historic streetscapes and traditional housing types, plus a plea for a return to ornamentation and an emphasis on sustainability – it has been criticised as ‘pastiche’ and as a ‘feudal Disneyland’. It is not hard to see why, given its eclectic mix of mock-Georgian and fake-Palladian and Scottish Baronial styles and its harking back to some mythic rustic utopia with flint-clad workers’ cottages and the like. 

But it is also popular: according to some reports, locals are prepared to pay 30 per cent more to live in Poundbury rather than equivalent housing schemes nearby. That’s hard to argue with. As are many of the ideas Charles espoused in 1984 and which have been put into practice there – not least sustainability, which is the route to architectural awards these days. In many ways, he was prescient and has been proved right – it’s just that architects don’t like anyone who hasn’t done the requisite seven years’ hard sketching to have a say. 

However, Charles was always more nuanced than critics such as Lord Rogers gave him credit for. I remember being struck, reading his book A Vision for Britain, about how he rhapsodised over some modern schemes – notably John Outram’s exuberantly po-mo ‘Temple of Storms’, which resembles an Egyptian temple and which Charles called ‘witty and amusing’; it is more prosaically named the Isle of Dogs Storm Water Pumping Station and does exactly what Thames Water says on the sign. So it’s not simply the case that he hates all modern architecture. Just the bad stuff, like the ‘giant glass stumps’ he said were disfiguring skylines all the way back in 1984. He must be dismayed by what has happened in London and elsewhere since.

The irony, of course, is that he has never been in a more powerful position to advocate for and bring about real change in architecture – to really push for the causes he believes in, because who would refuse the King another Dumfries House or Poundbury? But he is now bound by precedent and expectation to be silent. It will be interesting to see whether he can hold his tongue on matters that clearly lie so close to the royal heart – or whether architecture may yet prove his Achilles heel.