POUNDING DOWN IN POUNDBURY

I went for a walk in Poundbury, in Dorset.  It wasn’t completely awful but it was weird, and in fact bits of it were pretty awful.

Poundbury, you know, is Prince Charles’s utopian stab at urban development, planned by his tame architectural theorist Leon Krier.  Neither of these dudes lives in Poundbury, you’ll be surprised to hear.  Krier does drawings like this:

Poundbury gets compared to Disneyland and Stepford (where the wives comes from) but I kept thinking of The Prisoner - not the actual Portmeirion designed by Clough Williams-Ellis, the location where the tv show was filmed, but the fictional village – a place so calm and tranquil and well-ordered, you just knew something absolutely terrible was about to happen.

There is a town square of sorts in Poundbury, with a statue of the late Queen Mum – Krier designed the base.  



This is Queen Mother Square. Nearby is a pub named after Prince Charles’s wife - The Duchess of Cornwall Inn (what woman doesn’t want to have a pub named after her?), and just over the way, opposite the Waitrose, is a block of luxury flats that looks, deliberately, like a faux Buckingham Place, because you know, the real original Buckingham Place looks so awesome.

Incidentally, as you see, there is no grass in this public square, no benches, no identifiable pavements, nowhere to hang out.  There is also very little separation between pedestrians and cars, though there are some bollards protecting the statue.  They might also protect pedestrians, but that’s obviously not their prime reason for existing. The walker would do well to keep moving.

This lack of pedestrian friendliness comes as something of a surprise.  Poundbury was supposedly built to be a super-pedestrian-friendly place. The Prince would have you believe he’s a great believer in walking.  In 2004, he set down his ten design principles.  Number five asks for:  “The creation of well-designed enclosures. Rather than clusters of separate houses set at jagged angles, spaces that are bounded and enclosed by buildings are not only more visually satisfying, they encourage walking and feel safer.”

         

In this he’s echoing Leon Krier who posits a city made up of quarters or quadrants, the centers of which can be crossed in the course of a ten-minute walk.  For most of us, that’s no more than a half-mile stroll, which seems a little unambitious, and just pitiful for anybody who enjoys walking in a big city.

In fact one of the first things this walker noticed was just how car-friendly Poundbury seemed, perhaps because, at the moment there’s a great deal of free parking.  However, since the population is scheduled to double in size in the next few years, a parking spot adjacent to the Duchess of Cornwall Inn may be increasingly hard to come by. 

Along with this, I noticed just how many garages there are in Poundbury – huge numbers, most of them not attached to the dwelling of the car owner.  In fact there were quite a few examples of flats built on top of one or more garages belonging to other people, the disadvantage of which seem utterly obvious.

There are a few exceptions, but the vast majority of the garage doors are painted plain black.  Now, I’m not suggesting than selecting the paint color for your garage door is an inalienable freedom or a great mark of self-expression, but my own feeling is that I’d prefer any color so long as it’s not plain black.  I also thought those plain black “canvases” might represent a challenge and a provocation to the youth of Poundbury, but apparently not, and that may be because Poundbury the youth is in such short supply.

Of course I saw other people walking, some with dogs.

One woman with a Highgrove bag 

I also saw a couple of cats, of which this is one

The place was clean, it was safe, it was nice, and I’m not an idiot, I’m not against any of those things, 

but oh boy did my heart leap up when I eventually found the council estate.

The only graffiti I saw were there or thereabouts, and I’m no snowflake when It comes to graffiti, and these was pretty rubbish in themselves but they came as a kind of relief.  

These acts of self-expression were on one side of this classical temple type thing, which was actually an electricity substation.

The graffiti were on the side that looked towards the sports ground and away from the council estate, which I suppose was basicalily a good thing.  And this “social housing” had so much that Poundbury houses didn’t have: life, an unruliness, a genuine if sometimes naff urge for eccentricity and self-expression.  There were front gardens for instance – there were very few of those in Poundbury proper.

Here, some of them had been paved over to accommodate a car, some were carefully tended with topiary, some had am ugly heap of rubbish on the grass but at least the residents had made their own choice of paint color for the garage doors.

But the thing that made the whole Poundbury walking expedition worthwhile for me, was this sign in the front garden of a house evidently belonging to a small local businessman.  

Just possibly Poundbury is more diverse than many people think, or want it to be.

WALKING WITH WOMEN

Well it did seem a slightly improbable thing, didn’t it, that you’d be walking in the woods somewhere near the town of Chappaqua in upstate New York, a couple of days after the election, and suddenly you’d find Hillary and Bill Clinton also walking there?

That’s what Margot Gerster said happened to her, and I have no good reason to doubt her, although the claims that this was some kind of PR stunt are, I think, understandable.

Gerster wrote on her Facebook page, “'I've been feeling so heartbroken since yesterday's election and decided what better way to relax than take my girls hiking.

'So I decided to take them to one of favorite places in Chappaqua. We were the only ones there and it was so beautiful and relaxing. 

“As we were leaving, I heard a bit of rustling coming towards me and as I stepped into the clearing there she was, Hillary Clinton and Bill with their dogs doing exactly the same thing as I was. 

“I got to hug her and talk to her and tell her that one of my most proudest moments as a mother was taking Phoebe with me to vote for her. 

“She hugged me and thanked me and we exchanged some sweet pleasantries and then I let them continue their walk.”

Well what else would you do?  But still, a couple of matters arise. First, it must be said that Hillary Clinton is looking surprising cheerful given recent events, and although we do know that walking is very good for depression, I still don’t think I’d be looking quite that sunny immediately after my presidential campaign had floundered on the treacherous rocks of Trumpism.

I also wonder who took the picture.  Was it Bill?  Or was it a bodyguard?  I imagine that even in the woods near Chappaqua, the Clintons travel with a pretty serious security detail.

There’s a lot in the press lately about women walking, not least the book  by Lauren Elkin Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London  The book isn’t published yet in the United States and I’m too mean to buy a hardback copy from England but I’ll get it soon, no doubt.

The author’s website says, “Flâneuse is a cultural history of women writers and artists who have found personal freedom as well as inspiration by engaging with cities on foot, and includes chapters on Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Sophie Calle, and Agnès Varda, among others. The London Evening Standard says, “larded with examples.”

We all know that women face certain, let’s call them challenges, when out walking, especially while walking alone, although walking alone doesn't necessarily solve much.  And in one of those odd, serendipitous moments I happened to be reading a piece in the book Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies,  Francis Wheen’s collected journalism from 1991-2001, in which he discusses Who’s Who and Debrett’s People of Today, and has great fun noting people’s “recreations.”

As someone who has a nodding acquaintanceship with a certain kind of literary “fame,” I wasn’t entirely surprised to find I’d had some small dealings with a couple of the people he mentions in the article, both of them in Who’s Who, both of them women, both of them apparently walkers.

One is Emma Tennant, that's her above, who simply listed “walking around” as a recreation.  It so happens I was once in the frame to write a short story for a collection she was editing.  I don’t think it ever appeared, or if it did I certainly wasn’t in it, but she invited me to her house in Notting Hill for discussions and whisky, and she and I certainly walked the length of her hall, once in each direction.

Rather more fun is Deborah Moggach – and nobody has ever denied that Deborah Moggach is a lot of fun – and she lists one of recreations as “walking around London looking into people’s windows.”  Well yes.  Who doesn’t do that given half a chance?  But how many admit it?

Ms. Moggach and I have definitely walked some short distances on the streets of London together, but we never found anybody’s window to look into.  Shame.

A long time ago I had a friend, Patrick, who was at Cambridge University at the same time as Prince Charles, in the early 1970s.  On one occasion in the early hours of the morning Patrick was walking home from some bacchanal and turned a corner and there heading towards him was Charles, also walking home from some other bacchanal.  They didn’t speak (much less exchange sweet pleasantries) but they acknowledged each other’s existence and the prince gave a shrug and a small jerk of the head indicating a man walking some twenty feet behind him: a bodyguard.  He looked deeply and suitably embarrassed.

This is pretty much the only positive story I’ve ever heard about Charles.  And I just found the picture below, taken in 1970 apparently.  There’s the prince walking with Lord Mounbatten, and behind him are couple of royal subjects.  That’s how young men looked in 1970.  Nobody has ever accused Charles of trying to appear like a man of the people.  Maybe he needed a woman to walk with.