There’s something about Poundbury.  A new town, started in 1993 on Duchy of Cornwall land adjacent to Dorchester and designed under architectural principles advocated by King Charles III, Poundbury is… different.

Old, and yet new.  Or should that be new, and yet old?  Amidst the various buildings, there are a range of recognisable historical architectural styles and features.  At first glance, it could be thought that the town had evolved in the natural way of most English towns, rather than having been consciously planned.  However, a second glance dispels this fiction.

Beneath the illusion of natural chaos, there is an underlying order, almost an oppressive order.  Everything is just a bit too neat; too clean and clinical.  Now, I am not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, in terms of somewhere to live and its standard of living, ‘neat’ and ‘clean’ would be seen as two desirables.  My gripe is altogether more nebulous.  It is more about the atmosphere they create. 

Walking the streets of the town, I find myself in sympathy with design critic Stephen Bayley’s assessment that it is ‘fake’.  But fake from what?  It is a more difficult question to answer.  Poundbury is not claiming to be anything that it is not, even if the Duchess of Cornwall Inn has a big sign on the outside wall saying ‘Established 1777’ when it was actually built in 2016.

One of the young waiting staff in the hotel said he remembered the site of the building being mushroom fields when he was a boy.

I think what most struck me about Poundbury was the lack of people walking in the streets, or visible at their houses.  The town was designed to be for people not cars but, in this respect, it has failed: the car is still king; the largest communal public spaces are car parks not village greens.

For me, it felt rather like a ghost town; abandoned before it has even been completed; somewhere that has been constructed as a museum exhibit rather than a living community.

I was perhaps most conscious of this feeling when I went for a drink in The Poet Laureate pub in Pummery Square.  From the outside, I could have been fooled into thinking I was entering a Georgian building, although I knew it had only opened in 2002.  As I opened the door, I had an overpowering memory of an old Dr Who episode from the Tom Baker era: The Android Invasion.  The Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith enter a pub – The Fleur de Lys (strangely appropriate given the King Charles III connection) – in the countryside village of Devesham, only to discover the local population have all been substituted by robot replicants.

Now, my reception in The Poet Laureate was perfectly friendly, and there was nothing about the place that should have given me this first impression, but memories once conjured are hard to dispel.

© Bradley Dunbar

Contrary to appearances, Bradley Dunbar enjoyed his time in Poundbury.