Plans for 2,500 new homes outside the historic market town of Faversham have gone down badly with some residents. But the UK needs housing, and this is a promising site…
“We’re all proud to have a king,” laments a resident of Faversham in Kent, “but we thought he was going to be a custodian of the land and look after it.” “Disgusting”, says a passerby, walking her dog, when asked her opinion of proposals by the Duchy of Cornwall to build almost 2,500 houses on the edge of the town. “The feel of the town is changing,” says Carol Smith, a lifelong resident who says she will move out if planning permission is granted: “It breaks my heart.” The Duchy of Cornwall is, of course, the private estate (687 years old and covering just over 200 square miles) of the Prince of Wales. These plans were a pet project of Charles III, from the time when he held that title.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. “Beauty” in architecture, according to the campaign group Create Streets – by which they tend to mean traditional-looking buildings like those in Poundbury, the duchy’s well-known model town in Dorset – is the magic ingredient that will charm nimbies into welcoming new housing. If only everything were as lovely as in the old days, goes the thinking, objections would fall away – a concept, thanks to Create Streets’ advocacy, that has been incorporated into national planning policy. South East Faversham, as the development is called, is in effect the next Poundbury, designed according to similar principles, yet furious locals tell me that, “even if some of the homes are less hideous than usual,” the project “will end up being a car-dependent dormitory town”. Architectural style counts for little next to emotional and practical objections.
