A High Court Judge was reported by the Guardian to have described Prince Charles’ intervention in the redevelopment of the Chelsea Barracks site as “unexpected and unwelcome”.
    I was surprised; Mr Justice Vos is a judge who is careful about expressing his own views. Then I find that the Guardian got it wrong – the judge said that the developers “regarded this intervention, no doubt, as unexpected and unwelcome.”
    I don’t doubt it was unwelcome; a lot of money down the line, they didn’t want their plans turned over now; but I frankly doubt that it was unexpected.
    Prince Charles has frequently and famously expressed his views on architecture; it was unlikely that he would overlook the treatment of a key site in central London, adjacent to the C18th classicism of Chelsea’s Royal Hospital, more especially when he had been approached by a large group of the public who feared the imposition of an unsympathetic, uncompromisingly modernistic structure, on a huge scale.
    If the prince has a function, passing on the views of many thousands with less scope for influence seems an entirely supportable one, especially in the face of the solipsistic arrogance of the architect involved. Lord Rogers had often displayed his intolerance of those who don’t share his vision of a landscape that belongs to and effects us all.
    His loudest objection to Prince Charles’ expressed concerns is that it is undemocratic, but there is distressingly little democracy behind deciding what buildings will fill our landscape.
   Take the beautiful town of Ludlow, where I live.
   There is a deep, immensely uplifting charm to a place that has retained 800 years of varied and developing building styles, which escapes very few visitors and is treasured by the more civilized inhabitants. However, when it was decided to put up a new library, the developers in conjunction with county council planners produced a scheme for a huge, industrial looking building, vastly out of scale with every edifice around it (apart from an already disastrous redbrick supermarket).
    There was, of course, a “consultation”, in which a host of individuals and organisations expressed their profound objections to the great modernistic shed that was proposed. These “consultations” are the “democratic process” behind which arrogant architects, bull-headed, big-spending council officials and profit-motivated developers hide.
    In a poll conducted by Building magazine, in which readers were asked to choose between Richard Rogers’ plan for Chelsea Barracks, or an alternative drawn up by traditional architect, Quinlan Terry and based on a classicism which has recurred and given great satisfaction and pleasure since the Greeks first created the concept, it isn’t at all surprising that Terry’s plan drew 60% of votes cast.

Disgracefully, there is no voting, no obligation on the part of planning hearings to take any notice of the views and wishes of the people who live in a town – who own their landscape. So I find myself now working in a library which is a cavernous, noisy space, which seems to function as a meet and chat venue, where large quantities of higher space are unused, and commercial activity occupies a proportion of the charmless lump of a bulding. The planners also bequeathed the town an ugly, useless little open space in front of the hulk, “perceived” by the County Council, “to attract people, thus benefitting nearby traders.” It is nearly always empty, occupied by discarded chewing gum and lager bottles.
    There are countless towns and cities throughout Britain that have been ruined in this way, and there have been many occasions when the public have yearned for someone of sufficient influence to raise a voice in support of their objections.
      The almost compete vandalization of the once lovely city of Gloucester, of which only the sublime cathedral and its immediate close remain, wouldn’t have happened if there had been a Prince Charles to suggest to the culprits that they should consider not just the wishes of their rate payers, but also the longer lasting qualities of traditional, vernacular and less aggressively modernistic building design.

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I imagine every community must have its share of hard-core moaners and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few in Ludlow who think there are disadvantages in living in a town which functions as a kind of open air museum – a medieval street grid, some half a mile square, of well-preserved historic dwellings and public buildings, headed by a near perfect perpendicular church and a Norman castle (with its own C12^th circular chapel). These are the people who object to the May Fair (a centuries’ old tradition) taking over the town centre for 3 days (and making it smell strongly of un-nutritious hamburgers), or to the rock concert that is held in the castle at the end of the summer festival – small-minded people who do not recognise that the less erudite, ordinary Ludlovians have as much right to a little community fun as those of us who go to see obscure French films or string quartets in the Assembly Rooms.

Even when the castle is opened up, as it often is, for diverse festivals and events, and the town’s streets are choked with charabancs, it’s good to know that the town’s delights are being more widely shared. For the bright, blue-sky weekend just past, Ludlow hosted its 15^th Ludlow Food Festival – a Foodies’ nirvana, reflecting the wonderful revival of interest in traditional English food and drink – ales, goats’ cheeses, muttons, ciders, smoked ducks’ breasts – the diversity on offer was astonishing .

Of course, there had to be an element of competition, too, with local brewers, bakers, butchers and chefs vying for accolades. One frankly unscientific competition was hosted by Mr Graham (Floyd) Wilson-Lloyd, Ludlow’s ubiquitous landlord, former town mayor and operator of the Church Inn and the Charlton Arms. Seventeen beers and ales had been submitted by local pubs (not, on the whole, the crummy ones owned by Pub-Cos), and judging them fell to exhibitor and brewing maestro Alex Barlow, who was exhibiting in his ALL Beer stand to promote his excellent new ALLBeer Guide to ales & beers. As often happens in Ludlow events, there had been some confusion, and the poor chap hadn’t been told there were to be winners and losers. He arrived to be handed what he (perhaps unfortunately) described as a poisoned chalice, though, having drunk from it, he did survive – only just. For with so many variables (the disparate skills of the cellarmen at the various submitting pubs) to cloud his judgment, it wasn’t surprising that in his preliminary blind tasting he rejected some of the Ludlow ale-drinking community’s firm favourites (including mine – Hobson’s Best) and provoked some rowdy booing. A memorable commentary and condensed history of Britain’s relationship with ale was provided by Sarge, the cellarman from the Church Inn. Sarge is a published poet, chronicler of the town’s lore, and a man of surprisingly diverse erudition who can talk with equal fervour about Bach, Glenn Gould or Django Rheinhart, and who summarised the reaction of the audience as pisspotical. He had by then plied them with pints of Ludlow Gold (the most local of ales) as he explained how the relationship between the Saxon Hengist and Horsa (cunning because they were ‘foreign’) and the British King Vortigern hinged on the ale-swilling characteristics of his people. I didn’t know that. But in the end, the beer judged the best was the best, with temporal and geographic relevance, Darwin’s Origin, by the Salopian Brewery – a real joy of a bitter, and on offer at the Unicorn.

Another arena – the whole town, in fact – was occupied by the Ludlow Sausage Trail. No doubt the hard-wired moaners objected to the whole town reeking of Sausage, which the five or six competing sausage makers offered from pitches dotted about the town. The local and visiting punters formed long queues at each, democratically selecting the tastiest sausage and providing a sound endorsement for the winner to shout about for the year to come. I don’t participate as a voter, for I am a firm and faithful fan of the Francis sausage, and don’t want to be confused by too much choice.

As an inhabitant of the town, I was only too happy to see it overun with sausage-munchers from evry corner of the land, and I look forward to seeing them all again next year, and to hell with moaners.

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Last weekend Ludlow festival kicked off its 50^th anniversary in the profound hope that the rain Gods would lay off. The key element of the festival has always been a fortnight of performances of a Shakespeare play – this year, Romeo & Juliet­ – held in the magnificent arena of Ludlow Castle’s inner bailey. On a warm summer’s evening, as the swifts swoop across a pinkened sky, there can be few more lovely settings.

In the cold rain, it is a species of purgatory.

Alongside the play, other shows, concerts and talks have been put on in an attempt to develop the fortnight into a full-blown arts festival, although somehow this has never really evolved into the recognisably cohesive, focused occasion it could be. Nevertheless, some of the individual events are imaginatively conceived, as was a concert performed by English Ayres on Sunday night in the magnificent, west-facing dining-room of Oakly Park House, three miles north of Ludlow. The Georgian mansion, home of Lord and Lady Windsor, was reordered extensively in the 1820s for Lord Windsor’s ancestor, the Hon Robert Clive by C R Cockerell and is one of his and Shropshire’s finest. Before the concert we stood on the lawn in front of the house, looking  across paddocks and parkland liberally strewn with the venerable oaks that gave the park its name, while we drank a few glasses of champagne.

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There were no Ferraris at the Ludlow Hunt point-to point, held on Saturday below the massif of Titterstone Clee on a magnificent spring day, where the SUN put in an appearance in more ways than one.  Shropshire (and I’m glad about this) is a long way from London and is not Ferrari country (apart from the chap who owns the excellent Golden Moments Indian restuarant). However, there was a Red-Headed visitor from the metropolis who kept us on our toes. I was first alerted to her presence by finding former racehorse trainer, erstwhile Lothario, latterly Telegraph columnist and newly arrived novelist Charlie Brooks waving the punters into the car park. Staying with local friends, he was taking the opportunity to promote his new novel among the large gathering of horse folk.

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Anyone who’s spent a few hours in Ludlow will tell you it’s as handsome a town as you could find in Merry England (imagine all those parfit knights, codpieces and Black Death), stuffed with alleyways, timbered houses with oaken chins that jut over narrow streets and a fine castle built on a rocky mount above a gushing river. It still even has a suite of late-Georgian Assembly Rooms, as favoured by Ms J Austen and her sort when seeking social interaction. Despite being coloured an iffy crushed-blackcurrant-and-cream that Farrow & Ball must have been selling off cheap, the Assembly Rooms still serve their original function as a place of encounter and diversion in this small town. Last Saturday – a techno dance rave, next week – jazz rapper, Soweto Kinch. There are plays and concerts and other types of dances, although no White Sergeants dashing or otherwise engaged in cotillions or quadrilles or any of those high-waisted Regency dance routines where you barely have time to say, ‘Lah, me, Miss Jemma, you put me in mind of a frisky filly,’ before your partner hurls you into the solid bosom of a passing matriarch.

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