𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

King Charles’s architectural vision of a modern community which incorporated the best of British building traditions and timeless values became a reality with Dorset’s Poundbury development and caught the imagination of homeseekers. Sir Simon Jenkins, a former National Trust chairman and a leading expert on Britain’s built heritage, believes the nation will be a happier and healthier place if it celebrates both urban and rural villages.

He argues the success of Poundbury – which is now home to 5,000 people and includes private and affordable housing – could be repeated throughout the country. “You can replicate that 1,000 times on brownfield sites all over Britain,” he said in a Sunday Express interview. “There’s no problem. It just needs the Government to want to do it.”

His forthcoming book – The Village in Britain: And Why Place Matters – is a celebration of villages found both in the countryside and within cities, and a description of how planners and politicians made the mistake of abandoning time-honoured principles and herded people into tower blocks.

“Eighty to 90% of people who were rehoused in the modernist housing style of that period hated it,” he said. “I mean, overwhelmingly hated it.”

He describes it as “extraordinary” that at a time of tight public finances the “British state could move millions of people to somewhere they did not want to live”.

Sir Simon, 83, argues that “informality and indiscipline” are the “essence” of a British village, as well as the concept that every home and street corner is “different from every other and yet a part of the whole”.

Villages, he believes, encourage human interaction, which is the backbone of compelling drama – whether the show is The Archers or EastEnders.

“You could never set Coronation Street in a tower block,” he said.

His new work charts the story of British settlements from the earliest evidence of habitation to the present age when global celebrities seek homes in the nation’s countryside – “what were symbols of poverty are now symbols of wealth”.

Simon Jenkins’ The Village in Britain: And Why Place Matters is published on November 5 by Penguin/Viking