\u2018The smiling portrait of King Charles III\u2019. Credit: Aris Roussinos <\/p>\n
As Aslet notes \u2014 in a book whose gentle, cultured tone, befitting Country Life\u2019s longstanding architectural critic, occasionally flares into a pleasingly reactionary dismissal of modern Britain \u2014 Charles\u2019s worldview is \u201cbased on the premise that the world has taken a wrong turn. We ignore the wisdom of our ancestors,\u201d and instead \u201chave been busily creating dystopias [\u2026] whose social consequences will come back to plague us.\u201d Yet, Aslet notes, \u201cthere remain places, even in Europe, which are as God intended\u201d. Viscri, for both men, is one of those places: a model of the good life that stands in direct rebuke to Britain\u2019s own \u201cfallen world\u201d.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 Romania\u2019s newest sewage treatment plant \u2014 paid for by the King\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
It is not a retreat from modernity, but an alternate, even postmodern version of the present: in some ways, a gentle archeofuturism<\/a>. The King\u2019s aura has brought money into the village: over the tinkling of cowbells, I hear a plummy Englishman tell his guide, \u201cDo you know, on the way up we walked past a chap in a car I went to university with.\u201d 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, \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n But what of Charles\u2019s 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 \u201cgentle density\u201d, 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 \u201cDeano Boxes\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Even Classicism, in a sober, knowing form, has resumed its place in the sun. Through his London Housing Design Guide<\/a>, mandating the austere, brick-clad form of stripped classicism that has now become the capital\u2019s inoffensively tasteful 21st-century vernacular, Boris Johnson at least achieved something<\/a> to partially offset, when history weighs his soul in the balance, his many sins. The architectural journals today applaud works closer to Charles\u2019 tastes of the Eighties than the fashions of the era. As Aslet correctly observes, \u201cThe social housing that is now being designed by Peter Barber<\/a> 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\u2019s involvement may have contributed to this improvement but his intervention undoubtedly helped the process along.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAfter decades of mockery, Charles has effectively won the argument.\u201d<\/p>\n How far we have come: but it is nowhere near far enough. As always, architecture provides a metaphor for other, deeper woes, and the \u201cwrong turn\u201d a broken, demoralised Europe took after the disastrous Twentieth Century shattered our civilisation\u2019s confidence. Before the war, Aslet notes, ostensibly about architecture, \u201cModernism had been a cult, foreign in origin and patronised by intellectuals. After the War, it swept the board.\u201d Architectural Modernism was \u201cnot so much a style in architecture as revealed truth\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n The nadir, for traditionalists, came during Charles\u2019 own annus horribilis of 1997, when \u201ca \u2018New Labour\u2019 government under Tony Blair had come in, with a mission to destroy tradition wherever it was found \u2014 in the House of Lords, in rural sports, in organisations such as the Boy Scouts \u2014 and rebrand Britain as a young country, under the banner of Cool Britannia.\u201d We live today with the consequences of Blair\u2019s worldview, which increasingly looks as outdated socially \u2014 and as rejected by the British people \u2014 as its architectural manifestations. As Aslet notes, Charles \u201chad often been right on the big things, making the correct judgement call years before the rest of the world had caught onto them\u201d.<\/p>\n And not just in architecture. Aslet\u2019s book often veers towards court gossip, tracking who is in and out of the King\u2019s favour with a courtier\u2019s amusingly bitchy eye, at a level of cumulative detail that may make the general reader\u2019s eyes glaze over. But one passage \u2014 and we assume Aslet includes it for a reason \u2014 relates the downfall of Charles\u2019 urban renewal champion<\/a>, Rod Hackney, for too frankly revealing the King\u2019s inner fears. Hackney\u2019s sin was that he \u201cshared views expressed by the Prince during a private dinner on the train after the Handsworth riots, during which four people died: \u2018He is very worried that when he becomes king there will be \u2018no go\u2019 areas in the inner cities and that the minorities will be alienated from the rest of the country.\u2019\u201d Charles\u2019 secret anxieties of 40 years ago anticipated current discourse. Yet, stung by fears of media criticism \u2014 for having arrived at now widely-held conclusions too early \u2014 the King abandoned public interventions in Britain\u2019s urban realm for the safer territories of traditional drawing and Islamic art, \u201cjudged to be safe spaces for him to move in\u201d, 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 \u2014 but has Charles kept up with his people?<\/p>\n There is a recent tendency on the British Right, which has entered a period of revolutionary ferment, to reject \u201cChuck the Woke\u201d. Excessively focused on defusing republican sentiment on the Left \u2014 now rapidly becoming a historical irrelevance, across our shared civilisation, due to its self-destroying adherence to nonsensical Utopian schemes \u2014 the King\u2019s 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<\/a>, even celebrating it<\/a>. There is an old Eastern European saying, which squares the revolutionary anger of the peasantry with their love for their distant monarch, that \u201cthe king has bad advisors\u201d: Charles may do well to reflect on it. Much of the King\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s dysfunction, surely he should find the courage to challenge it once again. Transylvania\u2019s 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 \u201cmost precious and fragile diversity\u201d, as the King phrases it, is buckling under a worldview that has \u201csuck[ed] out the character, charm and spiritual meaning from every pore of our human experience\u201d. What Charles has achieved in Transylvania is magical, yet it is hard not to leave Viscri with something approaching envy. Don\u2019t his people deserve some of this magic too?<\/p>\n Aslet aims to explain the process by which the King has ceased to intervene in the nation\u2019s affairs. \u201cAs one insider puts it,\u201d he says (one wonders who this royal insider could possibly be), \u201che 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\u2019t go too far. If they do, the machine swings into action to ensure the effort is dissipated.\u201d 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<\/a>, perhaps, in the ailing king presiding over an unhappy and disordered kingdom. Yet in Britain, just as Charles once wrote of Transylvania, \u201cPeople are yearning for that sense of identity and belonging and meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the tiny Romanian village of Viscri, deep in rural Transylvania, the crown and feathers of the Prince…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127107,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7708],"tags":[4023,748,7709,7730,7731,1760,38484,7710,519,4678,16],"class_list":{"0":"post-127106","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-royals","8":"tag-architecture","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-british-royal-family","11":"tag-charles","12":"tag-charles-iii","13":"tag-king-charles","14":"tag-monarchy","15":"tag-royal-families","16":"tag-royal-family","17":"tag-society","18":"tag-uk"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114561020509186137","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018Viscri is a delight.\u2019 Credit: Aris Roussinos <\/p>\n
\u2018What Charles has achieved in Transylvania is magical.\u2019 Credit: Aris Roussinos <\/p>\n