With Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s passing, there are naturally many changes that will occur. Unpicking Queen Elizabeth’s name, image and iconography from public life will take some time. Coins and bank notes, flags, postage stamps and many more uses of the Queen’s image and her official initials (ER and EIIR, standing for Elizabeth Regina and Elizzabeth II Regina) will over the coming months and years be replaced by images and symbols representing King Charles.

There were also more immediate changes that occurred on The Queen’s death, with the former Prince of Wales becoming King Charles III and his son William immediately taking his place as the new Prince of Wales and the 25th Duke of Cornwall, which was formerly held by the King. With King Charles’s accession to the throne, Prince William has inherited the Duchy of Cornwall estate—which was valued at more than £1 billion (円166,497,400,000) at the end of March 2022.

The Duchy of Cornwall has been an income stream for Charles for more than half a century when he became entitled to receive income from the estate at the age of 21. This is thanks to the ownership of a landed estate of more than 52,000 hectares , which also makes him one of England’s biggest landowners.

The Duchy was created in 1337 by Edward III, as a personal endowment for his son, the Black Prince. Ever since, its lands and revenues have belonged to the male heir to the throne – now William.

The Duchy of Cornwall owns land across 20 counties in England and Wales – the majority of it not in Cornwall.

Much of the estate comprises farmland, but it also includes homes and commercial properties, forests, rivers, coastline and about a third of the Dartmoor national park, which was once used for mining minerals such as tin and copper. One of the estate’s more unusual holdings is the Oval cricket ground in Kennington, south London, which has been leased by Surrey county cricket club since 1874.

Another unusual holding of the estate is Dartmoor Prison. The prison was built in an extremely isolated location high up in Dartmoor near Princetown. Originally built in the early 1800’s to hold French prisoners from the Napoleonic War, it was converted to hold UK convicts in 1850.

While the Duchy of Cornwall is in essence a portfolio of assets, in reality, under Charles’ control, it has come to represent the issues he feels most passionately about. The estate has been shaped to fit his vision of Britain by applying his personal philosophies, which at times were ahead of their time and received much criticism. His critics accused him of meddling in political and social issues that should not be of concern to the next monarch.

Charles began his environmental activism long before words like “sustainable,” “organic” and “grass-fed” were trendy. In fact, much of the British public viewed his passion for the environment as an “oddity” when it first began. He was the oddball that talked to plants, an eccentric in many people’s eyes. But he was talking about the environment, destruction of natural habitats around the world, carbon etc long before it was cool. 35 years ago, he converted to organic farming, renting 1100 acres of farmland at Home Farm from the Duchy, thus becoming both landlord and tenant. Home Farm has become a successful and viable working farm, and a flagship for the benefits of an organic, sustainable form of agriculture.

King Charles’ other major passion over the years has been architecture and urban development. His most noted public outburst happened in 1984 when he famously opened his attack on modern British architecture and in particular the proposed design for an extension to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The occasion was the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the setting Hampton Court Palace. Charles had been invited to present the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture to the Indian architect Charles Correa. He was expected to do little more than raise a glass of champagne to the winner. But this is exactly what the prince did not do. Instead, he seized the opportunity to criticize just about every aspect, facade, plan and section of the Royal Institute of British Architects. His masterstroke was to trash the proposed extension of the National Gallery designed by Ahrends Burton Koralek which he described as a “monstrous carbuncle”. The design was subsequently dropped.

Through land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, Charles has been able to build two new towns to demonstrate his vision of urban planning. Poundbury in Dorset and Nansledan in Cornwall. His goal was to create new communities where everyone could find a job, the poor would live alongside the rich and where pedestrians are more important than the car. Both developments have been criticized for being over-sanitised and like a Disney theme park, with pastiche architecture. But the properties are sold quickly when they come on the market and the residents so far seem to enjoy their living environment.

Poundbury is an urban extension to the Dorset county town of Dorchester, designed in accordance with the principles of architecture and urban planning as advocated by Charles in his book ‘A Vision of Britain’. Poundbury has been described by critics as a middle-class ghetto. However, more than a third of the dwellings qualify as affordable housing. The majority is social housing, owned by charitable trusts and rented to low-income tenants. Thirty percent of Nansledan homes are affordable housing, very important in an area of Cornwall which has seen local people squeezed out of the property market by skyrocketing house and land prices.

Only time will tell whether these new communities are a success or not, but it does seem that Charles’ motivations behind these developments come from a good place.

So now to the future. The new Prince of Wales, William, is in sole control of the Duchy of Cornwall estate and the income it generates (in 2021-2022, Charles’ earned £23million from the estate). It will be interesting to see whether he continues in exactly the same direction as his father or whether he puts his own personal interests in the centre of decision-making. William has shown a keen interest in environmental issues and in conjunction with Sir David Attenborough in 2020 launched the Earthshot Prize, a £1 million grant awarded to five winners each year for their contributions to environmentalism.

In recent years, the royals have come under increasing criticism for not pushing harder to practice conservation on their vast estates. Many believe the Royal Family has an opportunity to send a powerful message about taking climate change seriously to people around the world, for example by rewilding sections of their land. Personally I hope the new Prince of Wales actions some of these calls.