In search of desirable residences

New housing is one of the great issues of the present moment. Roger White looks at the example of Dorset, where he lives, and tries to draw some lessons from recent development there

THE important debate about new housing—how much is needed, where to build it and how to design it—continues to rage. Discussion of the issue, however, commonly generates more heat than light, with politicians, developers and local communities often making irreconcilable demands of each other. It doesn’t help, either, that coverage is usually framed in national terms, so the points of note in specific projects easily lose focus. More helpful, therefore, is to try and look at the experience of a single county, Dorset. It’s the more interesting because it is here that one of the most debated of all recent developments that tried to break the mould—Poundbury, begun in 1993—is now nearing completion.

The earliest phase of Poundbury (Fig 1), on the undistinguished western edge of Dorchester, is generally low rise, rarely more than two storeys, perhaps more villagey than urban. As the development has advanced uphill, it has become progressively more ambitious, with many taller buildings in Regency urban idioms—some of the terraces and groupings being reminiscent of Cheltenham—until the visitor arrives at the grandiose civic focus, the predominantly Palladian Queen Mother Square. Many Modernist architects and critics have sneered at Poundbury, but it would appear to have set a positive example to at least some of the county’s small builders and developers. They have drawn profitable lessons from it about how to deploy local materials and vernaculars and how to juxtapose components to achieve seemingly unselfconscious groupings of buildings in a wider development.