A colonnade of doric columns flanks the entrance to the neoclassical Waitrose building in Poundbury, Dorchester, in Dorset, facing on to the congested car park of Queen Mother Square. Across the plaza stands a creamy yellow palazzo, crowned with a royal crested-pediment, and a Palladian hotel named the Duchess of Cornwall. A gigantic brick campanile rises above the Royal Pavilion from a triumphal stone arch, looming over the square.
“It was supposed to be the magistrates court,” the town’s master-planner, Léon Krier, told me in 2016, on a tour of the then Prince Charles’s model village. “But it ended up as luxury flats. I suppose that’s the spirit of our time. After all, the master-planner is not the master of the game.”
