Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines Prince Charles’s critique of the Scottish New Town of Glenrothes, exposing how princely power, government disinvestment, and labor exploitation coalesced to shape Britain’s perceptions of New Towns as legacies of industrial, architectural, and socio-political failures.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines Prince Charles’s influence on British architectural tastes through his 1988 TV documentary and book, A Vision of Britain, juxtaposed against promotional New Town films from the Scottish National Archives. It explores how Charles’s populist critique of modern architecture reframed public perceptions of post-war New Towns, particularly Glenrothes, a once-renowned Scottish New Town later labeled a “failure” as recipient of the Carbuncle Award for Britain’s "ugliest" architecture.

Situating Glenrothes within the industrial heritage of Scotland’s coal-driven economy and mid-20th-century efforts to relocate working-class families from overcrowded urban centers, this paper investigates the intertwined dynamics of industrial exploitation, aesthetic judgment, and systemic neglect. It interrogates how deindustrialization and political shifts during the Thatcher era dismantled the utopian aspirations of New Towns, replacing them with narratives of obsolescence and failure.

The research highlights Charles’s manipulation of these narratives to serve both personal and political agendas, using a populist aesthetic to mask deeper complicity in eroding the Welfare State. By linking Glenrothes’s trajectory to broader industrial and cultural transformations, this paper challenges the romanticized "heritage fairy tales" surrounding industrial labor and modernist ideals, exposing the systems of extraction and exploitation behind such projects. Ultimately, it calls for a re-examination of the narratives shaping Britain’s post-war built environment, emphasizing how industrial heritage is reinterpreted in the wake of deindustrialization.