Charles Moore
Of course it sounds outrageous, Lord Rogers’s claim that Prince Charles is interfering in the planning system in London. We are supposed to have a democratic process, not an unofficial vetting procedure run by the heir to the throne who, according to Lord Rogers, but denied by Clarence House, regularly receives plans from developers which he either approves or rejects.
Yet there is one thing which stops me getting annoyed with the Prince – evidence that throughout history, royal patronage has given us rather more impressive townscapes than have trained architects and town planners.
Would London be a better city without the role played by Prince Charles’s 17th century ancestor and namesake after the Great Fire of 1666? It was Charles II who picked out the blueprint for a new London, drawn up by an astronomer and amateur architect by the name of Christopher Wren.
Lord Rogers has previously tried to claim Christopher Wren for his side of the argument, suggesting that, had Prince Charles been in the shoes of Charles II he would have insisted that St Paul’s be rebuilt in Tudor style. But that misses the point. Wren was an outsider whose work would have been dismissed had a body of trained and experienced architects been put in charge of the reconstruction.
Would Paris be a better city had it not been for the input of Napoleon III, who appointed a civil servant by the name of Baron Haussmann to oversee its redevelopment? You can argue that the new Paris was pompous and grandiose, but you can’t deny that the boulevards continue to be appreciated by rather more people than flock to La Defense, the awful bit of Paris built between the 1960s and 1980s when the architects were in charge.
As for Prince Charles’s own contribution to modern Britain, the Dorchester suburb of Poundbury, it is easy to sniff at its faux Georgian buildings. Yet Poundbury sparked a revival of classicism in the design of housing estates which, if not always successful, are a lot more popular with homebuyers than the miserable 1960s and 1970s estates which preceded them.
Lord Rogers calls the Prince of Wales “architecturally ignorant”. He may well be – but then, he’s not exactly getting out his drawing board and sketching developments himself, just passing judgment on what is put before him. If Lord Rogers thinks non-architects have no right to an opinion on architecture he may care to reflect on how architects seem to have little inhibition in wading into areas which are beyond their own competence – such as trying to solve social issues through their buildings.
I am not sure that Prince Charles is the best arbiter of what makes a good building, but I am thankful that there is someone keeping the architectural profession in its place.