Who knew Dorset is so full of interesting placemaking experiments?
I was there at the end of the summer and came back with some good, bad, and downright ugly impressions. It was a useful moment of reflection on what placemaking and sense of place really mean.
King Charles’s new old town of Poundbury
The first (let’s get it out of the way!), our new King Charles’s personal placemaking crusade of Poundbury. It’s worth having a look because so many people have written about it, especially architects. I found it strangely soulless, like a film set. It feels contrived, overdone, and out of context – even though it’s designed to flow from the adjacent historic town of Dorchester.
One of the criticisms most often hurled at it is pastiche. Which is not something I have a problem with, per se. Pastiche in its true sense means tribute or celebration, not the pejorative term it’s now become. The first thing I learnt in my Classical Studies degree is that classical ideas, including architecture, have woven themselves in and out of western culture for millennia. Architects throughout history paid tribute to the great ages and styles of design (Lutyens was famous for it). And modern architecture often draws from and reinterprets historical themes. As Shakespeare said, there’s nothing new under the sun.
In fairness to King Charles, Poundbury is an unfinished project with some noble aspirations for community and environment. We all know new towns take time to develop and become part of the landscape. But the mishmash of mock-traditional styles feels hollow, with a sense the architecture doesn’t match the town’s 21st century ambitions. New towns and homes should be designed by the present needs and lives of the people, by the stories we tell, by the land, and by the passage of time from past to future. Not by one man’s outdated idealism and avoidance of modernity.
Capability Brown’s village of Milton Abbas
I had a similar feeling about Milton Abbas. It’s a pretty little village that looks preserved in aspic with all its identical thatched white cottages. Seduced by the promise of a quiet country retreat, I booked our Airbnb there – not realising until we arrived it was the first designed village in the UK. In essence, this is a neoclassical placemaking experiment by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown c.1773, in partnership with architect Sir William Chambers.
The Lord of the Manor, Joseph Damer, commissioned them to rebuild the village because it spoiled his view (yes, really). But after successfully relocating it over the hill, Capability Brown wasn’t happy with its contrived, overly picturesque uniformity. He vowed he would never again take on a project that required tearing down all the original buildings – an important lesson from history for today’s placemaking visionaries perhaps.
Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
I then went to the Thomas Hardy rooms in Dorchester Museum. This is the novelist and poet behind some of our greatest stories of ordinary people, often included on ‘100 books to read before you die’. Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure being three of the better-known ones. Directors love to turn them into painterly films or television dramas, and they continue to enchant (and sometimes depress) successive generations of readers.
Before he was a published author, Hardy had a career as an architect in Dorchester and London – inspired by his builder/stonemason father. He trained and worked mostly on churches and historical buildings, so he wasn’t known for original design. Max Gate, his ‘I made it as a writer’ self-build, is widely seen as a bit of a failure.
However, what his architect’s eye gave him was an extraordinary appreciation for place. He understood humankind’s ‘bone and stone’ relationship with both the natural and the built environment. A complete construct in his head of a dreamlike Wessex, based on everything he knew, permeates his novels. He gave all places his own names and you can find maps of Hardy’s Wessex online.
Much like Dickens, Hardy was a social activist. He campaigned through his writing on behalf of the working class, including on land and housing. He saw that times were changing and farming communities were being uprooted by the growth of industry. Importantly, while he was a romantic about natural landscape, he was also optimistic about the future. Hardy belonged to a new genre of realist-naturalist writers influenced by the progress of science.
Sense of place
By reading Hardy’s old note books and drafts, complete with architectural sketches and observations, you get a true insight into what sense of place really means. It’s about land, nature, people, events, stories. It’s the old and the new together. It’s the dark and the light. It’s everything a place has lived through and what it will become. Most of all, it’s created organically by the inhabitants – rooted in earth and built upwards, not dropped out of the sky in a vision imposed from above.
Do you have a placemaking project that you want to talk about? Get in touch to see how I can help.