Why Charles’ vision for a model Scots village is still bogged down in mud
Prince’s grand plan for 250 homes in Burns Country has seen only 34 completed... and unhappy residents stuck in a building site
ADECADE ago the 70-acre tract of boggy farmland was Prince Charles’s field of dreams. On this undulating East Ayrshire terrain a model eco-village would rise up. There would be homes of all sizes, each with a traditional design and its own distinct character.
There would be shops and small businesses, all within a five-minute walk of everybody’s house, thus encouraging residents to leave the car in the driveway.
And the whole 770-home development would be a golden opportunity for local apprentices to learn traditional trades and building skills which, with any luck, might result in more classically designed houses and fewer soulless, identikit ones like those found on so many modern estates.
Phase one – to be complete by 2017 – would see some 250 royally approved houses built on the edge of the former mining town of Cumnock, while the remainder of the village would take shape over the following ten to 15 years.
Yet today the heir to the throne’s dream village of Knockroon is not so much a village as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cluster of houses.
The building site office has been closed for so long it is now fenced off and not a single brick has been laid in well over two years.
Phase one is indeed complete, say Knockroon’s sponsors, but it comprises just 34 homes – many of which, according to one dissatisfied resident, are beset with snagging issues.
Meanwhile, directly across the road, work has begun on a 156-home development of modern bungalows and villas which do not conform to the prince’s traditional design ideas. By the time it is finished it will dwarf the tiny eco-friendly enclave that thus far exists.
To cap it all, plans for a ‘super-school’ on Knockroon’s doorstep were approved last year, with construction due to begin in the spring.
Costing £63.5million, the huge campus will be the biggest capital project ever undertaken by East Ayrshire Council. It will replace two secondary schools, two primaries, a special school and an early childhood centre.
In all, 2,500 pupils will use it, resulting in a substantial increase in traffic rolling past Knockroon. So much for the village’s green credentials.
Somewhere along the line, the prince’s dream of a by-royal-appointment village in Robert Burns country became a nightmare – one which could haunt him for years to come.
WE were promised a lot of things,’ says Markos Vazakas whose parents, Yiorgos and Diana, bought a threebedroom house in Knockroon in 2015. ‘We were promised a community and new jobs, we were promised opportunities for small businesses, but what they have delivered is just another sub-par development. It’s like a dream that never actually came to fruition.’
It was a dream which began in a blaze of publicity in 2007 when a consortium led by Prince Charles stepped in to buy Dumfries House for the nation hours before its antique furniture and artworks were due to go under the hammer at Christie’s in London.
The Marquess of Bute – better known to many as former racing driver Johnny Dumfries – was seeking £45million for the Palladian mansion and its contents and, until Charles intervened, a campaign to put the property in public ownership had raised nothing like that.
Even after hard lobbying from the prince, the sum raised stood at just £25million – £20million short of the marquess’s asking price.
‘Then I’ll make up the difference myself,’ declared Charles.
Borrowing from his Charitable Foundation, the prince threw the £20million into the pot and, without even attempting to beat the marquess down in price, handed over every penny he was asking for. The rush, explained Clarence House, was because the furniture was about to be sent to the auction house.
But it was not only the 18th century mansion that interested Charles. It was the farmland that came with it – and the cunning plan to use it to repay the borrowed £20million.
There on those fields, reckoned the heir, a Scottish version of Poundbury in Dorset could be built. Now extending to more than 1,000 homes, Poundbury was constructed on Duchy of Cornwall land on the edge of Dorchester according to the prince’s specifications and, despite a degree of criticism from architects, it has been a resounding success.
A quarter of a century after building work began, there are 3,000 residents, 180 local businesses and 2,000 people working in Poundbury-based jobs. There is a Waitrose, a village square with a statue of the late Queen Mother in it and few properties for sale stick on the market for long. The contrast with Knockroon 450 miles further north could scarcely be starker.
Admittedly, the Scottish development remains in relative infancy compared with Poundbury, which is set to be complete by 2025.
But nowhere in anyone’s master plan for Knockroon was it anticipated that just one square block of 34 homes would be complete within ten years – or that only around half of those would be purchased by regular house buyers.
The reality is that, from the beginning, practically everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
The project was launched at perhaps the worst possible time – as the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 began to bite – and a somewhat unfortunate place too.
While the house buyers in wellheeled Dorset were quite undeterred by high-end asking prices, the same could hardly be said for those looking for property around the former mining towns of East Ayrshire. By 2014, the cost of buying a three-bedroom home in the local authority area was cheaper than anywhere else in the UK at just £72,500 and even many of those priced at £50,000 were failing to sell. The asking price for the Knockroon homes, by contrast, was an eye-watering £250,000 – later reduced to £190,000 when nothing was selling.
YOU could have the best houses in the world but it’s all about location,’ said local estate agent Jess Nisbet at the time. ‘Knockroon is a fantastic, high-quality development but, unfortunately, it has priced itself out of the market.’
Then there was the contract which new owners had to sign to ensure the village conformed to the prince’s vision. There was a ban on satellite dishes and owners were not allowed to repaint their
houses a different colour. Even certain types of shrubs were banned from gardens.
With precious few sales by 2014, Dumfries House stepped in to buy back some of the completed houses to use as staff accommodation. Nine more were purchased as buy-to-lets by the Havisham Group, which is owned by David Brownlow, a multi-millionaire pal of the prince. He also owns the Knockroon café Da Vinci’s, the village’s sole focal point.
That leaves just a handful of sales to members of the public. Not that all of those who did part with serious sums of money to buy property in the UK’s cheapest property area have begun to regret it.
Ann Farrell, 55, who moved in to her three-bedroom home with her husband Ian three years ago, says: ‘I’m really pleased with where we stay. I like the style of the houses. It’s a brand new house that looks like an old house.’
‘The only problem is this bit here,’ she says, pointing to the vacant patch of mud next to her house where other houses are supposed to stand. ‘It would be nice if they built them.’ But building work has been at a standstill for more than two years after the original developer, Hope Homes, pulled out of the project in August 2015 after a dispute with Dumfries House.
Details have not been made public but Clarence House denied reports the developer quit in frustration at the lack of progress.
The upshot was that even the small fraction of Knockroon which had been built was incomplete. Pavements were unfinished, parking spaces unprovided and street lighting left uninstalled. Then there were the snagging issues in the newly completed houses.
Mr Vazakas says: ‘When we are walking up and down the stairs of a brand new home, you don’t expect the wood to warp to the extent it creaks like a 100-year-old house.’ He complains that some windows were not properly fitted, that exterior paint is flaking off some of the homes and that others have been affected by damp.
With Hope Homes out of the picture, now it is up to the new factor, Dumfries House itself, to resolve the outstanding issues. And, as a goodwill gesture while the village is brought up to scratch, no factors’ fees are being charged to any residents.
Even the seemingly painless task of coming up with street names for Knockroon proved vexatious. The prince put forward 17 names – only three of which were accepted by the local authority.
Gowan’s Green and Greenmantle were both rejected over concerns they may be linked to Celtic’s playing colours. Tillietudlum was loved and hated in equal measure, Ellangowan was thought ‘too Ayrish’ and Redgauntlet – after a novel by Sir Walter Scott – left most cold.
If the very thought of Knockroon leaves the prince a little deflated these days then it’s small wonder.
There are, however, grounds for cautious optimism. Over the past 12 months street lights and parking spaces have materialised and the pavements – for the handful of completed houses – are finished.
And, according to one Dumfries House insider, work on phase two of the project is expected to begin in the next 12 months. Not that this will involve the addition of many more houses. Hope Homes had a rather more ambitious schedule of development to that which Dumfries House now envisages, explains the source.
‘We are concentrating our efforts to develop smaller areas of around 20 to 30 homes at a time.’
NOR are neighbouring building projects such as the new housing scheme and superschool necessarily seen as detrimental to Knockroon. Rather, says the source, they show that change is happening in the area and Knockroon is at the forefront of that.
Is it credible, then, that in the next ten or even 20 years, this tiny enclave of homes will have mushroomed into a Scottish Poundbury espousing the prince’s values in architecture and urban planning?
Or was East Ayrshire simply the wrong place at the wrong time for a royal pet project?
At Dumfries House comparisons with Poundbury are not encouraged. It is understood that, even when complete, perhaps decades down the line, Knockroon will have no more than 600 homes and mixed use buildings.
A spokesman for The Great Steward of Scotland’s Dumfries House Trust said: ‘Whilst the vision and values behind Knockroon and Poundbury are similar, they cannot be compared in terms of size.
‘Knockroon is recognised as a forward-thinking development which is acting as a catalyst for the regeneration of the local area, as is evidenced by the various other developments which are currently under way.’
The question is, will the prince’s model village be lost in the midst of more active construction projects which neighbour it? Or is his field of dreams the stuff of financial disasters?
‘A ban on satellite dishes and certain paint colours’