It feels a bit like a film. You step off an empty, single-decker bus onto the edge of an empty, misty town square. As it pulls silently away into the abyss, you’re confronted with a vaguely arts-and-craft monolith with a fake bell tower, the gabled awning a distant cousin of an out-of-town Tesco megastore. Visibility is poor, but in the distance you can just about make out the looming nine-foot bronze frame of a war hero, perched broodily on a plinth of Portland stone. Walk closer and from the fog emerges a grimacing five-storey neoclassical nightmare and a weird, yellow porticoed palace. It’s Islington, it’s Versailles, it’s Legoland. Except, over the other side of the square is the unmistakable pistachio signage of a Little Waitrose. The bell tower’s a bridal shop. The palace is a block of flats. The war hero is the Queen Mother. Confused? Welcome to Poundbury.
Much has been written about the first foray into town planning of King Charles III, né His Royal Highness Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, Prince of Wales. It’s either a utopia or a twee hell, depending on who you read. But here’s the top line: the genesis of Poundbury came about in 1987, when West Dorset County Council decided to expand westwards into the fields from the county town of Dorchester. The land had been, since the reign of Edward III in 1337, Duchy of Cornwall land, but rather than sell up to the council for a generous price the Duke of Cornwall, Charles – who had long had an interest in urban development and architecture – agreed to work with them to build his vision of England: a return to tradition, a reaction against estate modernism, the wet dream of a thousand Quinlan Terry fanboys and internet edgelords.
Like every good town, Poundbury needed a place for the local workers to congregate after a long hard day at the coalface. So Charles built two: The Poet Laureate, which opened in 2002, five years after the initial phase of the project began; and The Duchess of Cornwall Inn. Camilla’s Bar was finished in 2016, with the first pint of grog poured lovingly by Her Royal Highness herself for the King who, according to the Duchy of Cornwall’s website, remarked – presumably with the aghast ghost of Kenneth Williams lurking just out of shot – ‘God bless her, and all who drink in her.’
It was outside The Duchess of Cornwall Inn that I found myself, lightly coated with the chalky drizzle of the Dorset Downs, on the afternoon of Charles’ coronation. The Fence had dispatched me and three other sots to Poundbury like faithful pinthounds to assess the scene on the big day, and soak up both the ambience and the local refreshments.
The Duchess is undoubtedly an impressive building. It’s massive. The attention to detail on the outside is staggering, from the Duchy shields adorning the tops of the dormer windows and the prim and proper pilasters to the lion grotesques littering each level. By contrast, the inside of the pub looks like a Wetherspoons. The copper taps, high ceiling, wobbly wooden table and weathered leather seat combo – it’s all there. Even the ambience was as morgueish as a Spoons, which wasn’t helped by the wizened geezer in the corner playing The Connells’ ‘74-’75 on an acoustic guitar. Considering it was coronation day, the vibes were rotten. No flag-waving bonhomie here – there wasn’t even that much interest in the fag end of the ceremony itself, which was playing out on mute on the Samsung on the side wall. Still, I’d come all this way, and I was desperate for something continental and crisp in the 4.9% ABV region, so I ordered my pint, ascended the spiral staircase and sat down at the nearest, wobbly, table.
When I arrived at yet another one of my achingly trendy north London house parties later that night, I was asked extensively about my trip. It sounds so uncanny, the literati replied in unison. That uncanniness was no better illustrated than in the interior of The Duchess of Cornwall Inn. Oil paintings of lords and ladies of yore filled the vermillion walls and intricate candelabras hung from the panelled ceiling. Except, take a closer look, and the paintings are prints; the candles are lightbulbs, with fake wax dripping down the sides; the ceiling is made of flimsy steel sheets. Were the paintings even real people? Or was it all a Midjourney night’s dream; an AI’s rendition of what portraits in a palace should look like? We sat in silence. A woman came and fixed the table. The guitar man started playing Elliott Smith. It was time to go to the next pub. As we left, we bumped into a camera crew from French TV station Canal+. They’d had the same idea as us and had been similarly unsuccessful, bar a pre-arranged interview in a local resident’s house. The rain began to ease off. Still, there was no one around: no group of mates looking for a Saturday afternoon spent laughing down the boozer, no young families off to the park. We pushed on.
After walking for ten minutes down a wide grassy knoll, past all manner of mishmashed trad architectural styles, we wormed our way into the cobbled alleys of Poundbury Phase One and to The Poet Laureate, just as the rain began to beat down again. The Google Maps images for the pub, being as they were composed entirely of plates of food photographed with the flash on, weren’t promising. But on entry it seemed we’d found the answers we were looking for. Look, there’s an avuncular landlord wearing a Union Jack bowler hat! There’s sport, albeit rugby, on the TV! There’s actual people, talking and drinking and eating and laughing together! I chatted briefly to the man behind the bar, who confirmed that they’d had the coronation on, as well as a live band, presumably not playing Everything Reminds Me of Her on repeat. The weather had scuppered BBQ plans, but even now, a few hours after the ceremony had ended, there was still a reasonable amount of families having a spot of lunch, although their number dwindled as the afternoon went on. Waiting for a round as the pub thinned out, I asked one woman at the bar if she’d watched the coronation.
‘We did! Although it was really an excuse to get down the pub and have a drink with everyone. Did you?’
