Prince Charles, eat your heart out. You may have been able to build Poundbury, incorporating your twee ideas of a fantasy British village, but I think Thames Town has trumped your hand. Being built by the Chinese in Songjiang, about 30 km from Shanghai, this is shaping up to be, in the words of Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian today, "a grotesque and extremely funny parody of an olde English town seen through Chinese eyes, and built by canny British developers".
The Guardian story claims that Thames Town is only one of seven satellite towns, the other six each have a national architectural style taken from a country as a theme. However, according to this story on designbuild-network.com, there are in fact nine towns being built, borrowing from the UK, the USA, Russia, Spain, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. I wonder what Holland Town will look like?
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
Leave a comment