The pastiche-Georgian architecture patronised by the Prince of Wales in such little townships as Poundbury, just outside Dorchester, attracted much mockery – some of it from my pen. Toytown, I thought. Where’s the exuberant confidence of real neo-Georgians such as Lutyens who could adapt, without copy-catting, the triumphs of 18th-century design? Then again, ask yourself which you’d rather live in: some hellish brutalist block or one of the Prince’s “parodies”? Now a stupendous Royal Crescent, designed by Ben Pentreath for the Duchy of Cornwall in Truro, has risen before our wondering eyes and is all but complete. Its debts to the Royal Crescents of Bath and Bristol remind us how infinitely more beautiful those cities are than much 20th-century architecture. This new Royal Crescent, simple, splendid, will have allotments for the inhabitants at the back, and beautifully planted public gardens at the front. I almost want to put our names down for a house there. Whereas, in the past, the heart always sank at the sight of new buildings going up on the edge of towns, the work of architects like Pentreath, exuberantly confident and  unasham­edly beautiful, makes you believe in a glad future. Quite an achievement in these stinking awful days.