Poundbury, England: Path to the Future and Race to the Past, Negotiating the Postwar Paradox

King Charles III was ahead of his time: an early opponent of climate change, advocate for organic farming, and critic of modern architecture. His views frequently inspired controversy that is reflective of much larger forces. In 1993, construction started on Poundbury, a new town meant to be a physical embodiment of his worldview. It would look Georgian but feature modern elements meant to assure environmental sustainability and combat income inequality. The need for modern amenities and building techniques was integral, even as that same design minimizes these things, rendering them imperceptible shadow elements. The result is divisive, described by many visitors as “surreal” and “artificially nostalgic,” even as others find the place inviting, friendly, and aesthetically pleasing.

This paper argues that Poundbury is a brick-and-mortar embodiment of the postwar paradox: an almost religious devotion to scientism and to “the future,” while at the same time grasping for the comforts of an imagined past. Perhaps this is why visitors to the town, even those who praise the place, describe it as “strange,” “like a movie set.” It is not so much “simulacra and simulation” as it is an uneasy negotiation, an effort to find a way to live in a period former AHA President J.R. McNeill describes as “something new under the sun.” To understand Poundbury requires understanding the relentless push and pull of countervailing forces that pit calls for perpetual growth against demands for sustainability, a consumerist devotion to individualism against a need for belonging, a celebration of the new against the comforts of a past defined by selective remembering and forgetting. The paper argues that if we want to understand nostalgia, we cannot remove it from a complex post-World War II project of perpetual renegotiation and imagining.