The King recognises the need to restore beauty to our environment

“There is a deep human need for beauty and, if you ignore that need in architecture, your buildings will not last.” So wrote the late Sir Roger Scruton, a philosopher gifted with an exceptional insight into the significance of aesthetics and their influence upon the human character. He might have added that not only would such buildings not last, but neither would the communities they were supposed to serve.

It is no coincidence that the most technically advanced age so far experienced in human history is also, in terms of the built environment, the ugliest. To imagine that the omnipresent hideousness of contemporary urban structures is not a major contributor to the malaise of mental instability that afflicts the upcoming generations would be jejune. Of course, social media are a prime cause of mental health problems; but to pocket one’s smartphone and walk through a modern townscape will hardly improve one’s state of mind.

The King is one of the most prominent among the small minority of people in this country who realise that. For decades, as Prince of Wales, he fought a lonely battle against a sneering, entitled architectural establishment that ferociously defended its own interests against an independent voice whose resources enabled him to challenge the cosy consensus that had swamped British cities in brutalist monstrosities. The quotable term “monstrous carbuncle” was like a clarion call, summoning those of authentic aesthetic sensibilities to reclaim the basic principle of architecture: that it must create buildings in which it is congenial for people to live or work.

King Charles has lived long enough to see the award-smothered, acclaimed tower blocks designed by his detractors laid low by the plunger of a detonator, dissolving in a cloud of dust the traumatic memory of the conditions in which their inhabitants existed. Local authorities, after universities, the worst despoilers of town landscapes, destroyed communities living in terraced houses and tenements, which they could have renovated, and instead imprisoned those they had evicted in piled-up egg boxes, many storeys high. These were battery residents, the victims of modernity and fatuous social engineering.

Charles’s riposte was Poundbury, a model town on Duchy of Cornwall land in Dorset, constructed in accordance with the ideas outlined by the (then) Prince in his book A Vision of Britain. The architect, Leon Krier, drew up a plan based on traditional Dorset architecture which was submitted to interested parties, their views being incorporated into the scheme. Construction began in 1993 and the final section is expected to be completed around 2027.

It is almost impossible to gain an objective assessment of Poundbury. The notion of the heir to the throne, not himself a professional architect, overseeing such a project was anathema to the gatekeeper professionals; on the other hand, Poundbury’s defenders are open to the charge of sycophancy towards the Prince, now King. Does Poundbury work?

The answer is yes. Granted, there is a faint hint of kitsch about it – even, in its early days, a whiff of the surreal village in the old television series The Prisoner (actually Clough Williams-Ellis’s fantasy creation Portmeirion). Yet British architecture has partaken of kitsch since the late eighteenth century, when Horace Walpole gothicized Strawberry Hill. It has a legitimate role in lending a familiar identity to new structures, soothing the susceptibilities of those who inhabit them. To the Victorians, St Pancras Station was a reassuring link with the past, partially camouflaging the stark modernity of the new railway age. Gilbert Scott and, in ecclesiastical architecture, Augustus Pugin did not hesitate to revisit the gothic style, with conspicuous success.

Poundbury is not perfect; but neither are most chocolate-box Cotswold villages. Poundbury does something very desirable and socially constructive: it provides a built environment that does not shock or depress; for we live in times when a building’s importance may derive not from its overall character, but from what it does not do. It does not crush the human spirit, as does omnipresent brutalist modernity. It provides a living space that, deliberately, refrains from imposing upon residents the modernist architects’ ambition to “express the age”, an infatuation that, since the 1950s, has destroyed those parts of urban Britain that Hermann Goering missed.

Now the King is addressing a further project: a proposal to build, over 20 years, a total of 2,500 new houses on Duchy land in Kent, utilising the latest technology to make them carbon neutral, while employing traditional architecture, interspersing the area with woodland, meadows and orchards. On the practical side, amenities such as primary schools and commercial estates will be included in the development. By today’s standards, it sounds idyllic; a glimpse of how civilised planning could have progressed, had the government not crippled the housing situation with mass immigration.

Yet people are objecting. The much-demonised “Nimbys” are protesting against the development. It is only fair to say that they have every right to do so. So-called “nimbyism” is nothing more shocking than residents protecting their immediate environment. It is the logical extension of the maxim that an Englishman’s home is his castle. These are Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”, predictably scorned on every possible occasion by today’s developer-friendly Tory MPs. They may be wrong-headed, however, in opposing the royal scheme: most residents elsewhere in Britain would give their eye teeth to face no more threatening a form of development than this sympathetic project.

The King has had a wholesome influence on British architecture, particularly the domestic sector. To scroll through new private housing developments online is to recognise that many firms have reverted to traditional styles of housebuilding, albeit the modern materials make them less congenial. Beyond that, there is a serious academic revival of interest in traditional architecture which, partly as a legacy of the late Sir Roger Scruton, partly independently, has secured a foothold in academe.

The Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture was established at the Neo-Classical Downing College, Cambridge in 2021. It is a collaboration between the two constituent departments of the university’s Faculty of Architecture and History of Art, working with the Faculty of Classics. Generously funded for the past three years by the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, the centre provides a forum for research and exchange of ideas about the classical architectural tradition, across time and place.

In the realm of church architecture, a well-established school at the University of Notre Dame in America has for years now been leading a revival of interest in traditional ecclesiastical buildings and furnishing, sending students to Rome to study churches there. In the 1960s, the Catholic Church, creator of the majestic cathedrals that define Europe’s Christian heritage, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, plunged into an orgy of iconoclasm, stripping churches of beautiful furnishings and constructing new places of worship resembling garages. 

It is to be hoped new generations of church architects may redress that Philistinism. It is no coincidence that the elimination of God from the public square and the counsels of the elites coincided with the expulsion of beauty not only from architecture, but from all art forms. We have learned painfully, over the past century, that a society that has abandoned all concept of the metaphysical necessarily deprives itself of spiritual inspiration to inform architecture, the visual arts and every other medium of aesthetic expression.

Gone, too, are the great Christian dynasties that patronised artistic endeavour. Versailles is a monument to the fact that Louis XIV, despite his fondness for war, represented something far more important as a cultural icon, as the embodiment of France’s artistic sensibilities. Ludwig II of Bavaria built for himself, rather than the wider public, but Neuschwanstein is a monument to the creative passion of past dynasts. King Charles is following a well-trodden path in seeking to create for his subjects, albeit on a modest scale, a more eligible style of living.

Modernism has proved a blight on this and every other country. A century ago, it was possible to travel far and recognise, from the built environment, which culture one was entering: Chinese architecture in Beijing, onion domes in Russia and so on. Today, the onion domes and a few such distinctive features are still visible, but the world is a deracinated monoculture of commercialised steel-and-glass monstrosities. That is the cultural outcome of globalism: universal diversity becomes global homogeneity.

It is no coincidence that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, exhibited in 1917, coincided with the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the old order. Duchamp’s urinal was the twentieth century’s equivalent to Michelangelo’s Pietà. That is called progress. We have achieved wonders with anaesthetics and antibiotics (and squandered that gift to near-extinction). We can travel around the globe at speed, but increasingly find there is little that is distinctive to discover at far destinations.

The same aridity is exhibited most pronouncedly in our art galleries and buildings; in novels and philosophical tracts. The realisation is dawning that we have run out of inspiration; that postmodern irony is a slack-jawed irrelevance; that universal scepticism has left nothing for people to believe in, a vacuum now being filled by novel superstitions, to animate the masses in their roles as economic producers and consumers.

It is nothing new for a later generation of architects to repudiate their antecedents. Robert Adam described the work of his Palladian predecessors as “ponderous and disgustful”; yet his debt to them is visible throughout his work, despite its more restrained style. Like all art forms and society itself, architecture should evolve and develop; but when the past is totally repudiated and a nihilist tabula rasa substituted, nothing of any worth, artistically or humanly, can be expected to emerge.

Roger Scruton perceptively observed: “Modernism in architecture went hand in hand with socialist and fascist projects to rid old Europe of its hierarchical past.” That was the root problem. All of those totalitarian ideologies had one obsession in common: “equality”. No good architecture, art, literature or social order can prosper under the dead hand of egalitarianism. It is the suppressor of individualism, of inspiration, of merit, of unselfconscious self-expression and of talent. So long as that chimera blights public discourse, no authentic and expansive culture can flourish in Britain or anywhere else. 

Beauty is the ultimate paradigm of inequality. The squalid state of what passes for “the arts” today speaks for itself. So far as the majority of the population is concerned, that blight affects their lives, consciously or unconsciously, most aggressively through the built environment. Brutalist buildings beget brutalist people. If we cannot, or will not, address that form of deprivation, we have no right to expect to live in a civilised society.

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