Carbuncles and King Charles: was the royal family’s meddling supertroll right about architecture?

‘Glass stump’ … Mies van der Rohe’s proposals for No 1 Poultry in the City of London. Photograph: John Donat / RIBA Collections

‘The most prominent architecture critic in the world” is how the New York Times once described King Charles III. It was 1989, and the then Prince of Wales was enjoying a wave of publicity after the launch of his spiritual crusade against the heresies of modern architecture. It was a high-profile, three-pronged attack, comprising a prime-time 75-minute BBC documentary, a dedicated V&A exhibition, and an accompanying coffee table book, grandly titled A Vision of Britain.

As architecture criticism goes, it was an unprecedented assault. “The prince’s performance, even sermon, was startling by television standards,” wrote critic Charles Jencks, “and I don’t know of any comparable use of the medium in our time. He looked straight into the camera, and six million viewers’ eyes, and told them what was wrong with them and what they should do about it.”

Birmingham was damned as ‘a monstrous concrete maze’ with a library that looked like ‘a place where books are incinerated’