The Charles-backed ‘super suburb’ that’s enraged locals – and Bob Geldof

Take a stroll south from the historic centre of Faversham, a medieval market town in Kent, and you will come to a footpath off a country lane.

A minute down it, and you are immersed in a scene that has remained unchanged for centuries. A swirling wheatfield is bordered by corn poppies and spiny sow thistle. Skylarks high above sing with the joys of spring.

The countryside is unblemished by anything modern – no cars or pylons ruin the view. As you carry on down the path, the wheat gives way to a sizeable plantation of blackcurrant bushes – a reminder that Kent is still, as Henry VIII called it, “the garden of England”. And also that this is the highest and most productive category of British farmland – Grade 1.

To complete the bucolic scene, you can admire a classic village cricket ground that has hosted matches for almost a century.

Imagine, then, if round the corner, there was an ambitious housebuilding company revving up to bulldoze everything you’ve just tramped across and turn it into a new suburb of Faversham, with 2,500 houses, 10,000 people, their cars, their sewage and their Amazon and Ocado deliveries.

It’s the kind of dystopian prospect that would undoubtedly outrage the great and the good, from our conservation-minded Prime Minister (who said at last October’s Tory conference that new housing shouldn’t be built “on green fields jammed into the South East”) to our monarch in waiting, the Prince of Wales.

Yes, surely Prince Charles more than anyone would be spluttering over his free-range Duchy breakfast egg at the very idea of South East Faversham, as the proposed mega-suburb (“mega” since it will increase Faversham’s population by 50 per cent) is not very imaginatively called.

Apart from one small thing: the Prince is the developer. And not just in a remote, notional sense. HRH is right in there, regularly rolling up to chat to the tenant farmers and padding concernedly around the cricket pitch – which is about to be replaced with an ersatz version of itself as the centrepiece of his new development.

Charles wants the 320-acre site, which he bought in 1999, to become the new Poundbury, the similar-sized development outside Dorchester, that his Duchy of Cornwall is still finishing.

Faversham’s citizens, normally fans of Charles, are not at all happy. Talking to them, I have found nothing but bafflement at what the heck – of all people – he is doing.

It’s fair to say that nobody else wants it. There have been marches. There is a Facebook group. Estate agents report some villagers selling up. There’s no infrastructure, the locals say, no schools, no roads, no sewage system. It takes three weeks to get a telephone appointment with the GP, and why can’t they build a decent retail park with some proper shops instead?

A touch of real bitterness is creeping into the restrained fury against Charles. Carol Smith,  recently retired as an NHS occupational therapist, is one of the locals behind the online campaign.

“OK,” says Carol, “so Highgrove, where he lives, is one house in 347 acres. And here, we have 320 acres that he wants to put 2,500 homes on.

“When the Duchy did their last public consultation, they were talking about people being Nimbys and asking people to be Bimbys, meaning ‘beauty in my backyard’.

“Beauty in my backyard is seeing nature and having a green lung around Faversham, as we now have. I’m sure Charles would say the same about his backyard. So I think NIMBY is a particularly offensive term when it’s doled out by people who have land and live in spacious surroundings.”

The strength and quality of the opposition is believed to have rather shocked the clearly idealistic and well-meaning Duchy of Cornwall team trying to get the project started.

Look at farmsfieldsfreshair.com, the anti-development website that locals set up, and also at the posters around town, and you might be surprised at how professional the propaganda looks. That’s because they are professional. A young Yorkshireman, Alex Myers, who only moved here with his family three years ago, happens to own Manifest, one of the world’s most successful branding and communications companies.

Myers has put his energy and expertise behind the campaign, although he feels the Duchy is being singled out for criticism as only the biggest and most public of what turns out to be a gaggle of developers targeting Faversham.

“The Duchy is quite an easy target because it’s attached to the Royal family, and it’s a huge development,” says Myers. “The bigger concern, though, is that there are seven other proposed developments ringing the town. We’ll end up destroying an incredible town.”

Another resident who could turn out to be a tougher, more persuasive opponent than the Duchy team were expecting is a man who has long lived a few minutes’ walk north of the town centre, and was knighted by the developer’s mother for his passion and expertise at campaigning.

Bob Geldof has tried to recuse himself from hogging the limelight over the development issue in Faversham and more widely, but is as voluble as you’d expect once he gets going.

“I have lived in Kent for 40 odd years and to see what amounts to a full-scale attack on the county and its people by the central government planners gives a lie to this government’s binding commitments to the UN Sustainable Development Goals of which Prime Minister David Cameron was co-chair, its own agreements under COP26 and Boris Johnson’s promise that they ‘would not build on green fields’ from the Conservative Party conference in October,” he said recently.

While almost nobody shows a scintilla of support for Poundbury 2, there is simultaneously a quite touching respect for Charles and his credentials, since Poundbury was such a success, as a “place maker”.

South East Faversham as planned is no ordinary ‘little boxes’ development, but a ‘landscape-led’ town-of-the-future with impeccable eco-credentials. And everyone appreciates it.

“They’re doing things we would want other developers to do,” says Eddie Thomas, one of the LibDem councillors. “They’ve held public meetings, they’ve done real, quality research on the town, and how you can enhance the heritage aspect.

Even so, it is almost impossible to see how Poundbury 2 could work. And how, if it does establish a precedent for every farmer around selling off fields, this special community-minded little town won’t be ruined.

Michael Gove has been making much of changing the balance in planning towards new developments being aesthetically acceptable to locals. The problem here is not with the design of new houses, but their existence. Gove’s ideas and the Duchy’s talk of the ‘beauty’ of new homes rather misses the point.

There’s also the question of what the new citizens, moving into their eco homes 10 and 20 years from now, are going to get for their money. Much romantic language pervades the Duchy’s buttering-up-the-townsfolk operation. “A simple grid of tree-lined streets will open south from the Roman Road, Watling Street, and frame a central green with a cricket pitch and pub,” they say. However, that Roman Road – actually, pre-Roman – is (and has been for decades) a traffic-choked rat run: the A2, prone to completely seizing up on a regular basis. Furthermore, the site is in reality sandwiched in an 800-metre wide fillet between the A2 and the M2.

People, governments and even companies have always had a penchant for building, or at least planning, new towns. It’s a passport to immortality. Whether South East Faversham eventually becomes a monument to the genius of Charles III, or a sorry testimonial to his naïve idealism, we will only know many years from now.