Being English, we don't like living with one another, unless we hail from other countries and cultures where family life is still all but sacred, and inescapable. Continentals, and others in faraway countries of which we know little, and care for far less, can stew together; what more and more of us wants is a box of our own, whether thatched with roses around the door, or fabricated in concrete with big windows and designed by earnest young architects sporting important glasses and shoes as difficult as the unpronouncable names of their e-world practices.Trouble is, this spells sprawl. Or, more accurately, S-P-R-A-W-L. In the nebulous "Thames Gateway" area, that stretches like the tentacles of some epic octopus east of Tower Bridge along the north coast of Kent and the south shores of Essex, John Prescott plans to build some 200,000 new houses in the next few years. Those already being built here are either cynical, or else unthinking shoeboxes designed to turn a fast buck rather than to enhance lives. The deputy prime minister, though, likes Poundbury, and has recommended it to those who seek his preference. He describes it as the "edge of a new age in urban housing". I beg your royal pardon?
The prince, to give him his due, certainly does have something to say on the subject; he has spent much time and effort over the past 15 years giving shape to Poundbury. It is, he believes, a model for urban expansion. But, "new age"? Poundbury is pretty in a Quality Street way; quaint cottages for forelock-tugging folk, giving thanks and praise to HRH's munificence, jostle politely along flower-filled streets, mews, lanes, squares and courtyards. Curiously, these have been designed by a clutch of highly qualified architects, rather than gnarled local builders, for whom the design of a chocolate box cottage is, to say the least, small beer, or even tinier cocoa.
What Poundbury is not is "new age". It is more gerontocratic than this, architecture and urban design as a comfortable afternoon nap in a favourite armchair and slippers. If it was a dog - if, I said - it would be an ageing and over-groomed labrador retriever.
Assuming we have the choice (ie money), we do tend to get the housing we deserve, and even want. Poundbury attracts those who want to live in a real life Quality Street. Tell-tale businesses and services here include Dorchester Chocolates, Dorset County Council's Toy Library, the Sunny Day children's nursery and Whistlejacket Equine Vets. Among shops, you will find The Dolls House and The Stitching House. And the local pub is The Poet Laureate, named after Ted Hughes, a friend of Prince Charles, although John Betjeman would have been more appropriate.
Poundbury is, perhaps, best described as a model urban extension for a Dorset county town. There are, of course, few of these in England. In fact, there is just the one. And just as there is one Port Sunlight, one Bourneville, one Portmerion and one Milton Keynes, Poundbury deserves to enjoy its splendid isolation. It is unlikely to translate particularly well to the wind-scythed marshlands of John Prescott's Thames Gateway, or elsewhere in brave, new, housing mad England. But, then few houses and towns ever will. Thames Gateway is to Poundbury as Rich Tea Biscuits are to Duchy Originals.
What the prince can tell MPs is that for some cheapjack reason we have all but forgotten how to build decent new housing. One-off, architect designed houses, maybe; low-cost homes, no. HRH's solution is to step back in time, in Lobb shoes and Hunter wellingtons, to the saccharine sweet cottages of Poundbury. How we go forwards in other parts of England is another question, and one Poundbury cannot answer. While we insist on treating housing as a commodity rather than as a way of life, or even a home, we will get the seemingly infinite tracts of junk housing that Prescott says he doesn't want, and that the prince, you and me detest, but which is coming to an extended suburb near you - especially if you live in the Thames Gateway, Stansted or Milton Keynes areas - whether you want it or not.
· Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic
Site
of the day: