BLUE BLOODS AND BLUEPRINTS
As landed aristocrats from Inverness to Southampton take up town planning, Eleanor Doughty investigates the new wave of Dukes-turned-designers
The Duke of Fife didn’t expect to be building a town. Until 2010, the former banker was happily running his family’s estate in Angus. Now, when his obituary is written, it will note that he was responsible for Chapelton, a 4,000-house town 10 miles from Aberdeen. ‘One of the first things I asked,’ he says, ‘was “Does anyone know how to build a town?”’
Clearly, he found some good advice: walking around Chapelton, one would be forgiven for supposing that it had always been there. On Sundays, the farmers’ market is cheerfully bustling, the wildflower meadows are awash with life and there’s a queue out of the door at Teacake, the cafécum-bistro. This means a lot to His Grace – for whom it is so personal a project that he has called one of the streets Bunting Place, after his wife’s maiden name – and he is justifiably proud of the locals’ positive reaction to the town’s evolution. ‘They have genuinely said nice things,’ he says. ‘It’s all very well talking about bricks and mortar and road systems, but if people aren’t happy, what’s the point? We hope that, in time, others might come here and see how well it can be done.’
What, then, is behind the Duke’s decision to diversify his skillset to include master builder? The answer lies, as it does for many of the new wave of aristocrats-turned-architects, in a combination of philanthropy, pragmatism and personal pride. Constructing new towns offers a potential solution to both the current housing crisis and landowners’ desire not to see the glorious landscapes their family have lived in and loved for centuries diminished by property developers working at scale, with little regard for design or sense of place. ‘It was looking like development was likely to happen either around us or on us,’ the Duke remembers. ‘And I took the view that if the area was going to be changed, then we might as well be involved big-time, rather than die a death by a thousand cuts.’
With the government continuing to put out worthy White Papers that seemingly offer no tangible solutions, the Duke and others like him have made it their mission to offer an alternative to the routinely rolled-out, cookie-cutter ‘urban village’, promising to create towns and estates that have their own names, atmospheres and identities. Four such schemes are currently in progress in Scotland, the families behind them – the Patons, the Grants, the Stuarts and the
Carnegies – some of the country’s oldest landowners. Each project is unique: houses at Chapelton, for instance, have a decidedly north-easterly feel, with charming residences built of granite with slate roofs (‘Everything here has to look like it belongs,’ says its landlord). Further west, Johnnie Grant, as the 13th Earl of Dysart prefers to be known, is changing the horizons of his family’s 500-year-old estate Rothiemurchus. His sustainable, 1,500-home woodland town An Camas Mòr (whose name translates as ‘the big bend in the river’) is being designed in collaboration with local people and prospective buyers, drawing inspiration from Victorian cottages, Nordic timber-clad townhouses and contemporary bothies on the Isle of Skye.
South of the border, the message is also getting out. The ever-enterprising Rothschild Foundation is building 75 Scandinavian-style houses at Waddesdon, while in Lincolnshire, the Burghley Estate has masterplanned more than 2,000 new homes in Stamford. This September, Aldred Drummond was given the green light to construct Fawley Waterside next to his family estate, Cadland, near Southampton; in time, he plans for it to be a ‘smart town’ of 1,500 homes on the site of the former power station. The area’s financial future is critical, to both local people and, perhaps, his pride. ‘My legacy will be to create a place that delivers economic prosperity to the Waterside for the next 50 years,’ he says.
It all sounds very future-facing, but today’s aristocratic town-planning patrons are, in many ways, merely continuing an ancient tradition: that set by mediaeval feudal lords, who would grant portions of their fiefdom to locals in exchange for some form of personal gain, whether military, domestic or agricultural, while benefiting from having their acres wellmaintained. In the 18th and 19th centuries, large-scale developments were fashionable among grandees. Cardiff, according to
Professor Sir David Cannadine, the author of Lords and Landlords, was ‘almost entirely the creation’ of the Marquess of Bute, and the 5th Duke of Devonshire developed Buxton into a spa town in the 1780s. In both cases, the expansion was logical: they owned the land, and though the aristocracy might have often shown an outward aversion to being involved in ‘trade’, who were they to overlook a potentially lucrative opportunity on their doorstep?
Perhaps the key difference between mediaeval and contemporary landlords is that today’s main demand from tenants or freeholders is money: landowners don’t require a pledge of fidelity, though many do stipulate that residents will respect and nurture the local area they share. The possibility of financial gain, garnished with a humanitarian outlook and an appetite for entrepreneurship, appears to be the motive for most of the self-appointed town-planners among our modern-day nobility. It may seem remarkable that one of today’s most pressing political challenges could possibly be solved by a gaggle of toffs – Britain’s last blueblooded Prime Minister was Alec Douglas-home, 14th Earl of Home, in 1963 – but on balance, it does make sense. ‘Landed-estate owners are the best people to build largescale developments,’ says the heritage consultant John Hoy. ‘After all, they are going to be driving past them for the next 200 years. It’s in their interest to make sure they are the best they can be.’
The current trend has been led by one man with perhaps the greatest interest of all in the aesthetic, environmental and political future of this green and pleasant land: our own heir to the throne. The Prince of Wales kick-started the new-towns movement in 1988, when he appointed the architect Léon Krier to masterplan a 400-acre extension to Dorchester called Poundbury, with the aim of providing a high-quality environment for people to live in. In practice, this meant somewhere with affordable but beautiful housing, and a low-pollution, mixed-use community – spaces to live, work and play within walking distance. The Duchy of Cornwall’s own website trumpets: ‘As Poundbury has developed, it has demonstrated that there is a genuine alternative to the way in which we build new communities in the UK.’ Work began in 1993 and is scheduled to be completed in 2026; almost 4,000 people now live there, while the community has spawned more than 200 businesses and provides employment for over 2,300 people.
Yet the homes created by the Prince are not what everyone would call affordable. In October, I found four-bedroom residences – mid-terrace, end-of-terrace, semi-detached and detached – on the market in Poundbury ranging from £450,000 to £950,000; by contrast, the average house price in nearby Dorchester for the same month was about £295,000. A devil’s advocate might wonder if
there was some snob value at work here. Nor has everyone been convinced of the town’s appeal: in 2015, one Poundbury resident described life there as ‘a bit weird’, adding that the local covenants insisted on by His Royal Highness ‘have prevented the “lived-in” feel that would otherwise have naturally developed’. The first of these forbids residents from painting or decorating the exterior of their houses ‘otherwise than in the same colour or colours as the Property here was previously painted’. Yellow lines on the roads are not permitted – though this is not exclusive to Poundbury – and in at least one house, a central-heating gas flue has been disguised by a gargoyle. In 2003, the design critic Stephen Bayley described the town as ‘an annoying, lifeless and sinister 400-acre site’, adding that Prince Charles apparently longed to relocate to ‘an imprecise vision of the 18th century in this soft-focus folly’.
Bayley and many others may have disregarded Poundbury, but there is no denying that its construction values are exceptional: doorsteps are Purbeck marble, while the roofs are natural slate. No wonder – many were designed by the tastemaker Ben Pentreath, one of the architects most in vogue for new-town planners, and a great admirer of the Prince of Wales. ‘He’s such an amazing man,’ says Pentreath of his employer. ‘He really is the guiding light – he took risks at a time in the 1980s when what he was talking about was being laughed at. People said that what he was proposing was a financial train-wreck, but he has proved that a business model could be made.’ Indeed, the Prince and Pentreath deemed the project so successful that they are now collaborating on a second: Nansledan, an extension of the Cornish coastal town of Newquay. The development’s pastel-hued properties made headlines when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge toured the site in 2016, shortly after the arrival of its first residents.
Still, in the short term, new developments are unlikely to be hugely profitable, or even especially popular: Nimbys lurk in towns and villages nationwide. The model is patient capital in action, as John Stuart, 21st Earl of Moray, knows well. In 2012, he received planning permission for a 5,000house town called Tornagrain, eight miles from Inverness, also being designed by Pentreath. Building work began in 2016, and although it is now home to about 400 people, the end remains a long way off: the town is expected to complete within 50 years, and the scheme has not yet started to wash its face financially. ‘If we were doing a similar project in the south of England, it would make far more commercial sense far quicker,’ Lord Moray explains. ‘You’re obliging yourself to take a very long-term view.’
Fortunately, his goal is not to make an immediate profit; rather, he has a vision of founding a place with true character. ‘It’s not like a housing estate on the edge of a town,’ he says. ‘You have to create a DNA right from the beginning.’ His plan is to group civil centres together in the heart of the neighbourhood, to make it as pedestrian-friendly as possible. ‘For example, you don’t have the primary school on the periphery, but in the middle, so that when parents walk their children to school, it’s less than five minutes,’ he explains. Just before lockdown, the local store at Tornagrain opened (‘an absolute godsend for the community’, according to Lord Moray), and proved so successful over the summer that the owner has been able to double its size. The pharmacy has recently been fitted out, as has a café, for which, in the early autumn, Lord Moray was personally recruiting a manager. ‘There is a lot of interest from other businesses, from counselling services to estate agents, and people wanting office units,’ he notes. It is inevitably a slow process, but the houses are selling quickly – to perfectly ordinary families who want somewhere nice to live – so the community is ever growing: ‘Our problem is delivering them quickly enough.’ Despite the hard graft, he remains deeply involved in the project. ‘My favourite thing is to walk around a town I’ve never been to before, and say, “This is something we could do at Tornagrain”,’ he tells me. ‘It has been enormous fun.’
Lord Moray’s undertaking may have been driven by personal passion, but not all aristocratic developments begin as a matter of choice. Take the case of the former investment banker Mark Thistlethwayte, whose family have owned the Southwick Estate near Portsmouth since 1539. In 2007, the local council was ordered to build 80,000 homes in south Hampshire, and allocated 10,000 of them to the Southwick acres. The family objected, and when this figure was reduced to 6,000, Thistlethwayte agreed to take on the project himself – deciding, like many of his contemporaries, that if there had to be new housing in the area, he was in a better position than anyone else to oversee it.
Despite never having anticipated taking on a project of this scale, Thistlethwayte feels proud to be working on Welborne because, in the end, ‘there aren’t many people who have the opportunity to do something like this’. But time is ticking on, he admits. ‘I’m 56 and have used a good chunk of my creative years fighting the planners,’ he says, pointing out that the entire endeavour is a major risk. ‘This could all fall over tomorrow, and I’ve probably spent £15 million on planning alone.’ But he remains optimistic: with any luck, the funding issues will be resolved, the build will commence in 2022, and the fun, fruitful bit can begin. ‘It’s nice to have the 500-year history of the estate behind us,’ he says. ‘Now, we are trying to write the next chapter.’
‘PEOPLE SAID WHAT PRINCE CHARLES WAS PROPOSING WAS A FINANCIAL TRAIN-WRECK, BUT HE HAS PROVED A BUSINESS MODEL COULD BE MADE’