Poundbury

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View of Poundbury, Dorset. All of the New Town's buildings were designed to reflect traditional architecture.

Poundbury is an experimental new town — or more correctly a new village — on the outskirts of Dorchester in the county of Dorset, England.

The village is built on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, and is an experiment of the ideas of Charles, Prince of Wales, who has challenged the post-war trends in town planning. The Prince is known for holding strong views on recent urban planning and architecture.

The village is built to a traditional high-density urban pattern, rather than a suburban one, focused on creating an integrated community of shops, businesses, and private and social housing; there is no zoning. The planners say they are designing the village around the people rather than the car and claim to be providing a high quality environment from the architecture through to the selection of materials, to the signposts, and the landscaping. To avoid constant construction, utilities are buried in common utility ducts under the town. Common areas are maintained by a management company to which all residents belong.

To some degree, the project shows similarities with the contemporary New Urbanism movement, primarily found in the United States, except that the design influences are, of course, European. The design of the houses tends to be traditional, with period features such as bricked-up windows, a feature found on many old British buildings, due to the window tax.

The overall plan was developed in the late 1980s by the European architect Leon Krier and construction started in October 1993. Krier's plans have been criticised for mixing too many different continental styles and the use of non-local building materials, which are not consistent with the traditions of Dorchester. It is expected that the four plan phases will be developed over 25 years with a total of 2,500 dwellings and a population of about 6,000.

[edit] Further reading

HRH Charles, Prince of Wales: A Vision of Britain : A Personal View of Architecture (Doubleday, 1989) ISBN 0-385-26903-X
Leon Krier: Architecture: Choice or Fate (Andreas Papadakis Publishers, 1998) ISBN 1-901092-03-8
Sandy Mitchell. "Prince Charles is not your typical radical." National Geographic. May 2006. [1] Accessed online 9/14/06