THE first thing that you notice about The Pump in Birmingham is the fancy brickwork. With detailed flourishes rarely seen in contemporary buildings, it looks nothing like the steel and glass creations of modern architecture.

But The Pump, a youth centre in a disadvantaged suburb in the east of the city, is not your average new-build. It is a £3.8 million project backed by the Prince of Wales to equip underprivileged school dropouts with the sort of skills and work experience that would inspire them to take up a career in construction.

So far, 25 apprentices have worked on site for up to two months learning a variety of basic construction skills, including carpentry, plastering and bricklaying. Last week they lined up to receive a certificate from Prince Charles and a tool bag from the building supplier Wickes to mark their “graduation”.

Throughout the royal visit there was much flag-waving and relief that a project which took eight years to come together, with substantial financial help from the Solihull Regeneration Zone and the European Development Fund, was nearing completion. Inspired by the results, there was even talk of repeating the exercise in other similarly disadvantaged areas.

Visitors to the site were left in no doubt that the centre was good for the local community and the young students. Sam Lumby, an 18-year-old trainee who has been out of school since he was 12, said: “I want to get into the carpentry trade. I want to do it for my mum and my two kids.” By encouraging difficult youths to get up in the morning and acquire new skills, it was almost as if the Prince had become the Jamie Oliver of the built environment.

However, in the longer term the building of The Pump and similar projects that might follow could do more than transform the lives of those who took part. It could make us all more critical about the new buildings sprouting up around the country, the materials used and the workmanship involved. Although the Prince is better known for irritating modern architects than spearheading developments, his influence is becoming harder to ignore. If we can get used to the idea of Charles the organic farmer bringing to market a range of tasty products through his Duchy Originals brand, why not Charles the master builder? Poundbury, Prince Charles’s traditional new town on the edge of Dorchester in Dorset, is the embodiment of his ideas on modern buildings along classical lines. The scheme, which is a third complete, aims to put up about 2,400 buildings on 400 acres of land belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall. With winding streets, traditional houses with individual character built from local stone and timber, a village square, a pub and a shop, it is a classical architect’s dream and a modernist’s nightmare.

But it is away from the focus of grand schemes such as Poundbury and through more modest projects that the Prince might have the greatest and most lasting impact on the built environment of the future — by changing perceptions at the grass roots.

In Birmingham, The Pump is designed to showcase craftsmanship and teach the apprentices the traditional skills that are being lost as mass-market developers strive to put up homes at lightning speed. “I deliberately drew brickwork that would be challenging for the students,” said Ben Bolger, the director of design for the Prince’s Foundation and a trained architect.

The result is not to everybody’s taste. One local compared it to “those massive super-pubs you get in suburbs”. Another said: “It looks like a cross between an austere public library and a factory rather than a friendly youth club.”

Even the firm of architects charged with the project admitted that the end result was not what they had originally envisaged. “If we had done it ourselves it would have been more modern and minimal,” said Jonathan Hines, one of the directors of Architype. Hines described the design process with Ben Bolger, the Prince’s representative, as a case of “pencils at dawn”.

Although the Prince of Wales’s ideas on architecture and design have often caused controversy, the project managers had not expected resistance from those working on site. “When the first group of bricklayers arrived, they complained about how difficult the bricks were to work with because they are thin and flat, unlike your average commercial brick,” said Sir Tom Shebbeare, director of charities for the Prince of Wales. Even some of the professional builders had trouble following the intricate design and working with lime mortar rather than cement. Yet despite the complaints and resistance from the builders, the quality of their workmanship stands out. Rarely do you see such attention to detail and craftmanship in the bulk of mass-market developments.

With deadlines to beat and costs to cut, many of the bulk developers are still giving us dull, uninspiring and badly built tiny boxes for homes. The perfect pointing or bespoke oak-framed windows that grace The Pump are usually reserved for the houses of the few rather than the masses.

However, by promoting the bespoke use of traditional and sustainable materials, the Prince is helping to reverse the demise of craftsmanship and raising all our expectations. As Sir Tom put it: “When the group finished they commented on how easy and boring laying ordinary bricks had become by comparison.” Job done.

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