In the tiny Romanian village of Viscri, deep in rural Transylvania, the crown and feathers of the Prince of Wales is displayed over a rustic doorway, set into the cornflower-blue limewashed walls of a rambling, wonky farmhouse. Through the door, and into the courtyard garden, studded with fruit trees in blossom, a series of placards prominently displaying the smiling portrait of King Charles III boasts of our King’s “blood relations with Romania” reaching back to the 15th-century Prince Vlad the Monk, half-brother to the better-known, Turk-impaling Vlad Dracul.
In the wildflower-rich strip of land behind, past a lazy stream, enclosed by rickety fences, basks a vegetable plot where local children are taught the rudiments of organic gardening by the King’s local foundation. Rocks mark each row, painted with the names of their apprentice cultivators: Ioana, Cosmin, Anastasia. As a placard declares, “Over time, it is hoped that the children will acquire many other skills that are very useful in life, for example punctuality, perseverance, working as a team, being patient and eating more healthily.”
Viscri, where Charles acquired the derelict Saxon farmhouse nearly 20 years ago, is, as Clive Aslet observes in a new book, King Charles III: 40 Years of Architecture, the King’s “Garden of Eden”, an “Arcadia, which represents everything that developed countries have lost, vulnerable to thoughtless modernisation of the kind that has done so much to wreck the British countryside over the past 100 years”. It is easy to be cynical, from a distance, at our King playing, if not quite peasant, then prosperous Saxon farmer in his Transylvanian retreat from modernity, like a benign improving landlord, the very model of enlightened feudalism. But in Viscri itself, it is hard not to be swept away by the romance of it. I came here, in the gap between the two rounds of Romania’s presidential election, to write an amusingly dismissive review of Aslet’s glossily-printed, slightly fawning encomium to regal good taste. I leave it half-wishing the King could more strongly exert his will on his own benighted kingdom, ruling the YooKay with a rod of (exquisitely hand-forged, artisanal) iron.
As Aslet notes — in a book whose gentle, cultured tone, befitting Country Life’s longstanding architectural critic, occasionally flares into a pleasingly reactionary dismissal of modern Britain — Charles’s worldview is “based on the premise that the world has taken a wrong turn. We ignore the wisdom of our ancestors,” and instead “have been busily creating dystopias […] whose social consequences will come back to plague us.” Yet, Aslet notes, “there remain places, even in Europe, which are as God intended”. Viscri, for both men, is one of those places: a model of the good life that stands in direct rebuke to Britain’s own “fallen world”.
And indeed, Viscri is a delight: hens and geese waddle along the unpaved central street, sheep graze outside the pastel-painted farmhouses, gypsies trundle fresh-cut hay back from their outlying fields in clip-clopping horse-carts. But it is not removed from modernity either: well-heeled, stout-booted French and German tourists of a certain age patrol the village, snapping portraits of headscarved peasants bringing home their cows, and eating produce from local farms to smooth jazz covers of 2020s pop hits in the pricy village restaurant, beside young hipsters up from Bucharest. The ducks swimming in the brook-cum-drainage ditch may look timeless: but the water runs into the brand-new reed-bed filtration system — Romania’s newest sewage treatment plant — paid for by the King’s largesse. The air hums with the buzz of chainsaws and the whine of trimmers, not the swish of scythes; within the enclosed compounds, families no doubt watch television, argue, get angry on the internet.
It is not a retreat from modernity, but an alternate, even postmodern version of the present: in some ways, a gentle archeofuturism. The King’s aura has brought money into the village: over the tinkling of cowbells, I hear a plummy Englishman tell his guide, “Do you know, on the way up we walked past a chap in a car I went to university with.” But instead of replacing farming, as is the case in much of Greece or Spain, the new tourism income complements it, making the old ways more profitable. The villagers mine their heritage to achieve a prosperity unusual in rural Romania, without cosplaying their traditions. They are not forced into cities, or to the slums of Western Europe, but stay at home, free to remain who they are. As Aslet remarks, “This could provide a better means of improving the economy than conventional growth strategies, which would destroy local diversity and repeat mistakes now being rued by other countries.”
But what of Charles’s own kingdom? In a book primarily about architecture, Aslet is correct to observe that, after decades of mockery, Charles has effectively won the argument. Both the Labour government and Conservatives pay lip service, at least, to the ideas of “gentle density”, walkable communities where a social mix of homes pay homage to local vernacular traditions. Whatever their minor flaws, the developments of Poundbury and Nansledan are infinitely preferred, even by their critics, to the mean-proportioned “Deano Boxes” which blight the land, an unsightly rash far worse than any single carbuncle. The statement architecture of the New Labour and Cameron era, clad in gaudy and combustible panelling, is firmly out of fashion, like the soulless, globalising worldview behind it. Ornament, in the muted form of the decorative brickwork and glazed Art Deco tiling that decorate expensive new urban developments, is back in.
Even Classicism, in a sober, knowing form, has resumed its place in the sun. Through his London Housing Design Guide, mandating the austere, brick-clad form of stripped classicism that has now become the capital’s inoffensively tasteful 21st-century vernacular, Boris Johnson at least achieved something to partially offset, when history weighs his soul in the balance, his many sins. The architectural journals today applaud works closer to Charles’ tastes of the Eighties than the fashions of the era. As Aslet correctly observes, “The social housing that is now being designed by Peter Barber and Mikhail Riches is infinitely better than the generality of that produced during the post-Second World War decades; it is impossible to quantify how much the Prince’s involvement may have contributed to this improvement but his intervention undoubtedly helped the process along.”
“After decades of mockery, Charles has effectively won the argument.”
How far we have come: but it is nowhere near far enough. As always, architecture provides a metaphor for other, deeper woes, and the “wrong turn” a broken, demoralised Europe took after the disastrous Twentieth Century shattered our civilisation’s confidence. Before the war, Aslet notes, ostensibly about architecture, “Modernism had been a cult, foreign in origin and patronised by intellectuals. After the War, it swept the board.” Architectural Modernism was “not so much a style in architecture as revealed truth”, presided over by a priestly caste certain that the old truths were not just outdated but immoral, doomed to retreat before the advancing tide of progress. The timeworn ways were out, and a Utopian vision was in, ushering the British people into its cold and inhumane framework, whether or not they wished, and whether or not it actually worked.
The nadir, for traditionalists, came during Charles’ own annus horribilis of 1997, when “a ‘New Labour’ government under Tony Blair had come in, with a mission to destroy tradition wherever it was found — in the House of Lords, in rural sports, in organisations such as the Boy Scouts — and rebrand Britain as a young country, under the banner of Cool Britannia.” We live today with the consequences of Blair’s worldview, which increasingly looks as outdated socially — and as rejected by the British people — as its architectural manifestations. As Aslet notes, Charles “had often been right on the big things, making the correct judgement call years before the rest of the world had caught onto them”.
And not just in architecture. Aslet’s book often veers towards court gossip, tracking who is in and out of the King’s favour with a courtier’s amusingly bitchy eye, at a level of cumulative detail that may make the general reader’s eyes glaze over. But one passage — and we assume Aslet includes it for a reason — relates the downfall of Charles’ urban renewal champion, Rod Hackney, for too frankly revealing the King’s inner fears. Hackney’s sin was that he “shared views expressed by the Prince during a private dinner on the train after the Handsworth riots, during which four people died: ‘He is very worried that when he becomes king there will be ‘no go’ areas in the inner cities and that the minorities will be alienated from the rest of the country.’” Charles’ secret anxieties of 40 years ago anticipated current discourse. Yet, stung by fears of media criticism — for having arrived at now widely-held conclusions too early — the King abandoned public interventions in Britain’s urban realm for the safer territories of traditional drawing and Islamic art, “judged to be safe spaces for him to move in”, and of course Transylvania, where the improving hand of a royal patron was welcomed rather than snubbed. Yet Britain has now caught up with Charles — but has Charles kept up with his people?
There is a recent tendency on the British Right, which has entered a period of revolutionary ferment, to reject “Chuck the Woke”. Excessively focused on defusing republican sentiment on the Left — now rapidly becoming a historical irrelevance, across our shared civilisation, due to its self-destroying adherence to nonsensical Utopian schemes — the King’s retinue have, it seems, neglected to assuage the growing anger on the politically far more vital Right. It is an anger born of disappointment, even betrayal, more than anything: rather than being an influential voice against the dysfunction of modern Britain, Charles is seen to be captured by it, even celebrating it. There is an old Eastern European saying, which squares the revolutionary anger of the peasantry with their love for their distant monarch, that “the king has bad advisors”: Charles may do well to reflect on it. Much of the King’s appeal has always been his removal from the mood of the times: yet he must be careful the angry mood does not sweep him and his dynasty away.
In Viscri, Charles found an escape from the modern UK. It is hard to blame him, yet it is Britain and its people he should devote himself to first. Instead of hiding from the UK’s dysfunction, surely he should find the courage to challenge it once again. Transylvania’s folk culture is ancient, vibrant and worth preserving from the homogenising pressures of a crass and ugly modernity, yet so is the culture of his own folk. This “most precious and fragile diversity”, as the King phrases it, is buckling under a worldview that has “suck[ed] out the character, charm and spiritual meaning from every pore of our human experience”. What Charles has achieved in Transylvania is magical, yet it is hard not to leave Viscri with something approaching envy. Don’t his people deserve some of this magic too?
Aslet aims to explain the process by which the King has ceased to intervene in the nation’s affairs. “As one insider puts it,” he says (one wonders who this royal insider could possibly be), “he exists within a machine that is beautifully engineered to suck out all the energy from him. Setting up initiatives to do good and bring people together are fine as long as they don’t go too far. If they do, the machine swings into action to ensure the effort is dissipated.” The King is, we know, unwell, though how much time he has left to bring his vision of a better world into reality is still a matter of whispered speculation. There is something mythic, perhaps, in the ailing king presiding over an unhappy and disordered kingdom. Yet in Britain, just as Charles once wrote of Transylvania, “People are yearning for that sense of identity and belonging and meaning.”
As Prince of Wales, Charles saw much that was wrong with Britain, and foresaw remedies that have only now become mainstream. The times have changed, and so have his people, in a way that may not be apparent in royal seclusion. An analogy can be made, perhaps, with the youth revival in the Catholic church, rejecting postwar pieties in favour of the sacred mysteries of tradition. In the time remaining him as King, if he can focus the love and care applied to backwoods Romania to his own people, re-enchanting his own realm, he might yet claim a place in history as Charles the Great.
