London doesn’t need Prince Charles's retro vision

Since Poundbury is in Dorset, you might think its weirdness shouldn't bother Londoners. But the Prince's successful campaign against Richard Rogers's scheme for a modernist development on the site of the Chelsea Barracks means that Poundbury matters to Londoners, for the ideas behind it inform the Prince's notion of what a city should be like. That's worrying, because Poundbury is the opposite of London.

In some ways Poundbury is better than London. It is remarkably clean. There wasn't a crisp packet to be seen when I was there; its genteel closes were free of obscene graffiti; no dog had fouled its pavements. Its roads are in great condition. At no point did my car disappear into one of the bomb-crater-sized potholes that pepper our city's roads. It is exceedingly quiet. I didn't hear a single siren, helicopter, low-flying 747 or pimped-up ride thumping with eardrum-splitting bass while I was there.

Quite soon, however, I was longing for any of those, for Poundbury feels like a morgue. There are few people on the streets, though plenty of cars - odd, given that New Urbanist developments are supposed to encourage walking not driving. There are few signs and no hoardings. There's nobody brown or black. But the gloomiest thing of all is that the place seems frozen in the past. Its buildings come in different styles - Tudor, Queen Anne, Georgian, Edwardian and sometimes a disturbing combination of several at the same time - but all are archaic. Even the street signs use a nostalgic font. Nothing there admits to being new (although everything is): modernity, it implies, is best avoided.

You can see why Prince Charles might be susceptible to nostalgia. The past was a lot more fun for the royals than the present. His antecedents didn't spend their time opening supermarkets: they thundered around on horseback locking up their enemies and sleeping with their friends' wives. The peasants knew their place, or were taught it if they didn't. Richard Rogers would have been fed to the corgis in a trice.

But it is less obvious why the rest of us should want to turn our backs on modernity - especially those of us who live in the capital. London may be a historic city but it has always embraced the new. Each layer of history, after all, was modern when it was laid down. Westminster Abbey was a mould-breaking building, in both its design and its engineering, in the 13th century: just as well that Henry III was a more forward-looking royal than Prince Charles, or he would have left us squat Romanesque architecture instead of glorious soaring Gothic.

Unlike Paris, which was laid out in a grand geometric plan in the 19th century, London's beauty has grown over the centuries. The pleasure in walking through its streets lies in finding a mediaeval church juxtaposed with the sharp-edged elegance of 201 Bishopsgate. As custodians of a great city, we should do for it what our ancestors did: endow it with the best of the new, not stifle it with nostalgia.

Iran's Twitter revolution

At last I see the point of Twitter. People all over Iran are tweeting to let each other and the rest of the world know what's going on, to pass on plans for the following day's protests and to warn each other where the police are gathering. Most of it is in Farsi but some is in English, and some of the Farsi tweets are being translated into English.

I've never followed what I hope is going to turn into a revolution at such close quarters before. It's thrilling.

Good to see Piers beefing up his CV

I have spent some time trying to find out whether the story that Piers Morgan is fronting the UK launch of Burger King's new fragrance, Flame, is a joke or not. Happily it seems to be true. The ad portrays Mr Morgan reclining in front of a fire naked but for a bit of red velour over his private parts: "the scent of seduction", whispers the strap-line, "with a hint of flame-grilled meat". It seems to me excellent that the advertising industry should take such a broad-minded view of the models it employs. Soon we'll have Gordon Brown selling rejuvenating face cream.

Tories have missed the point of Sats

The Tories' plan to replace the tests children do at the end of primary school with tests at the start of secondary school is incomprehensible. The point of Sats is to test not children but schools. Whether children can read and write by the end of primary school tells you whether the school is any good. On that basis, parents can decide if they want to send their children there and the Government can decide if it should fire the head teacher. Whether children can read and write at the start of secondary school is of no interest to anyone except their parents and teachers.