The architecture isn’t the first thing you notice when you drive into Nansledan on a calm Tuesday morning; rather, it’s how deliberate everything seems. The layout of the streets is designed to reduce traffic. Instead of the faceless garage-door suburb model that engulfed much of Britain during the postwar decades, the dwellings, which are situated on Duchy of Cornwall land in Cornwall, face one other at angles intended to promote genuine human interaction. As Duke of Cornwall, Prince William has long been involved in this kind of development. The scope of what he wants to do next and how he intends to pay for it are different now.
In general, the plan calls for selling about 20% of the Duchy of Cornwall’s enormous land holdings over the course of the next ten years and allocating the proceeds—roughly £500 million, or $670 million—to infrastructure for renewable energy, affordable housing, and environmental restoration. Depending on how cynically you interpret the modern monarchy, Prince William’s housing development investment is regarded as one of the most ambitious uses of royal estate assets in living memory. It is either a very well-timed piece of reputational positioning or a sincere declaration of social purpose. Most likely, a combination of the two.
You can learn something about the reasoning behind this from the five regions that were designated as priority areas. Kennington in South London, Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly, Dartmoor, and the Bath region are not arbitrary choices. They stand for areas with significant Duchy land holdings and either extreme, obvious, or both housing demand.
For example, essential personnel in the Isles of Scilly, such as teachers and nurses, are either priced out or unable to find housing. When you consider how tiny those islands are and how urgently that type of housing is required, a few extra social dwellings there don’t seem all that significant. Kennington, on the other hand, is located in inner South London, where low-income inhabitants have faced harsh housing conditions for at least 20 years.
This goes hand in hand with the larger Homewards project. It’s Prince William’s homelessness-focused, independently branded project with its own goals and public image. With the goal of adding 12,000 homes by 2040, of which around a third will be affordable, the housing construction investment essentially provides the capital base for what Homewards hopes to accomplish on the ground.
Housing policy specialists have been discussing whether that figure is truly revolutionary or insignificant in comparison to Britain’s overall housing shortfall. Millions of people in the UK are in need of housing. While 12,000 dwellings over a fifteen-year period is significant, it is not a solution on its own.
As this effort develops, there’s a sense that Prince William is attempting to accomplish something that future monarchs seldom accomplish: defining a cause prior to becoming king rather than after, and supporting it with something more tangible than speeches.
Before the climate debate caught up with him, his father, King Charles, devoted decades to environmental concerns that the establishment mostly disregarded. It’s still really uncertain if Prince William’s investments in housing and sustainability follow a similar trajectory—slow burn, then suddenly crucial. The land is real, the money is real, and the housing crisis it is intended to alleviate is getting worse every year.
