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.

Popularity: 1% [?]