As gaudy as Versailles: The Duchess of Cornwall in Poundbury reviewed

Poundbury is the King’s idealised town in Dorchester, built on his land to his specifications: the town that sprung out of his head. (‘My dream,’ says Harry Enfield in The Windsors, ‘was always to build a mixed-used residential suburb on the outskirts of Dorchester.’) It is so fascinating that I dream, briefly, of moving in for the completeness of the vision – who doesn’t want to live inside art? – and the portrait of the British class system in housing. Here it is, at last, laid out like a textbook: journey’s end.

It is becalmed on a Sunday evening, and sun saturated: there is almost no one about. Perhaps the residents are indoors, enjoying the lushness of their fittings. (The King is a noted perfectionist, and a very good watercolourist, better than Adolf Hitler.) Poundbury is a series of pastiche English cottages, townhouses and villas laid neatly alongside one another, like a practical demonstration of how to avoid a popular revolution over time with cohabitation.