A Queer Tour of Monarchy
Poundbury is:
A market town suburb in southern England
Charles III’s real life model village plaything
A template for future developments
A money-spinner for the royals
A microcosm of monarchy
A postmodern theme park
A really weird place
Poundbury is a project that explores the hard and soft power of monarchy through a queered and Othered lens. It began as a vague and nagging curiosity and took me right into Buckingham Palace for a reception with Camilla. I take you through grandiose avenues and lesser-known alleyways to explore the mismatch between monarchy’s objectives and optics. My work unfurled at a critical time for the royals in the UK.
Poundbury: A Queer Tour of Monarchy is a multi-dimensional work, shaped by the intersections of queer theory, feminism, neurodivergence and the social model of disability, working class identity, decolonisation, environmental activism and anarchism. It draws on my skills, training and experience in sociology, psychology, publishing and performance. I connect to the material intellectually, creatively, through emotions and in my body.
My guiding principles are: beauty, intelligence, humour, integrity, the liberation of all beings. I am working towards the end of monarchy, a power system which is incompatible with those values.
The book
The book is at the heart of the project. I wrote, illustrated and published it myself.
Find out more on the book’s main page at 33editions.
The expanded book
I made things relating to Poundbury that couldn’t be contained in the book. I think of this project as an expanded book, like expanded cinema or an immersive performance.
Poundbury is a research project
I talked to some people about developing Poundbury as a project. Home Live Art helped me with connections and a bit of money. This paid for some research time. I looked for scholarly material on Poundbury and I watched some documentaries. I read work critical and supportive of the British monarchy, including biographies and books for kids. I applied theory to my findings. I wrote this up as a starting point to help anchor me. I shared my research and listened to people’s responses. I networked and talked about some of my ideas with art world people.
Poundbury is a residency
I treated the project as career development. At first I failed to get support but then I applied for and was awarded a Reignite Bursary by Home Live Art. I put my application in The White Pube’s Funding Library. The money paid for a residency in Poundbury, where these videos come from, and some work with Aislinn Evans. I made field trips to other Duchy housing projects.
Poundbury is a high risk hangout with royalty
By a weird fluke I was invited to meet Camilla at Buckingham Palace. You can read a full account of this queer encounter in the book.
Poundbury is a party
The End of Poundbury took place on Charles’ coronation day. We had turns, outfits, lots of food and drink, a special playlist, togetherness. It rained a lot.
Poundbury is slogans and symbols
I developed slogans, including TOTALITARIAN MIDDLE ENGLAND and NULLA MONARCHIA INFANTEM! I drew The Poundbury Ears and put them on everything.
Poundbury is music
I made some music, I redicovered an older piece, composed a Poundbury Anthem and a song that can be sung as a round. Click the links to listen via Bandcamp.
You can also listen to Poundbury Étude at 58.15 or thereabouts on the podcast Move Under Yr Own Power #1 by Kirsty Fife which accompanies a zine of the same name.
We are the best
Roundbury lyrics, Homosexual Death Drive, 2023
We are the best
We do as we please
We do as we please
We own it all
We own it all
It’s just how it is
It’s just how it is
Poundbury is performance
I developed readings and movement scores which I shared at Live Art Club and with the Home Live Art crowd.
Poundbury is silvenirs
Homosexual Death Drive loves merch. I made some silvenirs for The End of Poundbury. Silvenir is an eggcorn from my childhood, a portmanteau of silver and the French verb venir, to come. It’s how I first heard the word souvenir.
Poundbury is an archive
I found essays, poems, drawings and mischief in my personal archive. I could see that there were the beginnings of something in my older work. I included accounts of this material in the book. Material generated by the project was added to this archive.
Where were you when Princess Diana died?
A stanza from Untitled (Princess) 2013
I met a girl and I had my hand up her arse
The phone kept ringing ringing
Dirty arse, shit on my fingers, sweat
A whole universe up there! Asteroids of shit! Beauty!
Then, watch TV all day expecting something to happen, what?
Am I supposed to care?
Poundbury is augmented by artificial intelligence
I used an artificial intelligence to play with some of the questions I had about Poundbury. I turned the generated text into a rude zine called Poundbury AI. The paper version is gone but the digital edition is available to download: Poundbury AI (.pdf, 164kb)
Poundbury is a digital map
I created a richly annotated map with some of the text from the book and a load of photos. I wanted to give readers an idea of the geography of the project.
Poundbury is playing and silliness
Poundbury is an architecture podcast
Listen to episode 85 of Matthew Blunderfield’s Scaffold podcast for the Architecture Foundation in which we discuss this project.
Poundbury has an ending
A year after finishing the project I had the opportunity to go to the sites I’d been unable to visit when I was doing Poundbury.
In Cumnock I saw another mini-Poundbury; parasitical, half-baked amidst unformed development land, fake traditional, a pompous plaque for Charles. Nearby, in the struggling town of New Cumnock, I swam in the Tamar Manoukian lido; more about that to come.
But it was Dumfries House that called to me. This is Charles’ opulent country house project where rich benefactors are hosted. It’s where Duchy money and influence is channelled. There is a lot of money here. In May 2023 The Guardian estimated Charles’ personal wealth at about £2 billion but this doesn’t include money from the Duchies, also running into the billions.
The grounds are free to visit and there are sub-projects and fripperies dotted around, including a gift shop that sells Dumfries House and Highgrove branded tat. Sometimes it takes a while for the mind to catch up with what the eye is seeing. You are there amidst staggering wealth, remove, access, entitlement, vanity and nauseating deference – the themes of Poundbury, the foundations of monarchy. Nestled by the cash register there is a donations box. I have now run out of words and feelings.
