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. The late Queen Mother’s favourite hymn ran: ‘The rich man in his castle/ The poor man at his gate/ God made them, high and lowly/ And ordered their estate.’ This is the hymn in bricks. It looks like Islington built in another galaxy by aliens, to explain Islington to aliens who couldn’t make the journey, and they almost get it right. Still, it frays at the edges, like the Matrix. It is un-real: counties squashed into squares, and centuries into months. The effect is numbing.

The restaurant is called the Duchess of Cornwall Inn and it sits in Queen Mother Square, in front of a sculpture of the late Queen Mother. Her face is weirdly indistinct, like a thousand-year-old child. If republicans want to understand their failure, they should come to Poundbury.