A Prettier Britain, at low cost
There is a peculiarly British habit of treating ugliness as a fact of nature, like drizzle, rather than as the accumulated result of thousands of small decisions that could have gone the other way. Drive through a French or Italian market town and the buildings, however modest, seem to belong to their setting.
Drive through the equivalent English town and you will more likely find a Victorian high street wearing a 1970s pebble-dash coat, its sash windows replaced by white uPVC, its skyline interrupted by a concrete slab that looks as though it lost an argument with an architect.
None of this was inevitable. It happened because, decision by decision, the cheapest option was also the path of least resistance. The good news is that what bad incentives created, better incentives can unpick, and unpicking it need not cost the earth or require a Ministry of Beauty.
We can start with what we've built wrong, not what we haven't built yet. Planning debates in Britain fixate almost entirely on the quantity of housing, and almost never on the quality of what already stands. This is a mistake of emphasis. The 2018 Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission and its ‘Living with Beauty’ report did the intellectual work of establishing that people have remarkably consistent, cross-cultural preferences for traditional street patterns, human-scaled buildings, and locally rooted materials.
The trouble is that the report's conclusions were treated as a matter of taste to be nodded at, rather than a set of facts to be acted on. A council can produce the loveliest design code in England and it will count for nothing if the planning system still treats ‘return to historic character’ and ‘clad it in vinyl’ as equally legitimate options requiring equal paperwork.
We should fix the incentives before we write the cheque. There is a peculiarity of the tax system that nobody defends and everybody ignores. It is that new-build housing is zero-rated for VAT, while repair and renovation carry the full 20 per cent. This means the tax code actively subsidises knocking a building down and starting again over restoring or resurfacing it. It is difficult to imagine a policy better designed to produce more demolition and less beauty, and it was almost certainly never designed to do so at all. It is simply an accident nobody has bothered to correct.
Levelling this asymmetry costs the Treasury relatively little and requires no new bureaucracy whatsoever. It merely stops actively punishing the thing we say we want more of. This is micropolitics at its purest: not a grand vision, but the removal of a distortion.
Once the incentives point the right way, targeted grants do real work rather than swimming against the tide. A local-materials matching grant, where the council tops up whatever an owner spends on brick and flint in the Cotswolds, harling in Fife, Kentish ragstone, Cornish granite, whatever the vernacular happens to be, restores the idea that buildings should look like they grew out of their own ground rather than out of a national catalogue.
It should be kept simple with a one-page form, a low cap, and a presumption in favour rather than a committee that meets quarterly to deliberate. The precedent already exists in conservation-area grant schemes, and the failure has been one of scale and simplicity, not of concept.
It is tempting to think that a system-built 1968 slab can be redeemed with a few coloured planters bolted to the balconies, and colour does help because cheerful render and a coordinated palette can transform a street for the cost of a few tins of paint. But the real ugliness of the post-war tower usually lives in two places: the roofline and the ground floor.
A blank concrete plinth at street level signals hostility to passers-by more effectively than almost anything else a building can do; a cheap projecting cornice or parapet screen changes a silhouette dramatically for very little outlay. Grants aimed specifically at re-glazing shopfronts and activating dead ground floors will do more for a tower block's dignity than an entire lorry-load of hanging baskets, welcome though the baskets are.
Much of what makes an English high street look shabby has nothing to do with the buildings at all. It is the thicket of signage, the guardrails nobody asked for, the overhead cabling strung between buildings like an afterthought, and the boarded shopfront that has sat empty for three years because business rates make letting it not worth the landlord's trouble.
Undergrounding cables and consolidating street furniture is unglamorous, but highways studies consistently show it does more for perceived beauty than most facade grants. And a modest rates surcharge on long-term vacancy, paired with light-touch ‘meanwhile lease’ rules that let a shop be used temporarily without triggering a full commercial lease, would do more to end the boarded-window blight than any beautification budget line.
Georgian and Victorian Britain built beautifully at scale not because every builder was an architect, but because pattern books existed, pre-approved, freely available designs that made ‘good by default’ easier than ‘ugly by default.’ There is no reason a council could not publish the same today, a menu of elevations, proportions, and materials that meet the local code automatically, sparing the self-builder both the fee and the ordeal of bespoke design. Make beauty the path of least resistance and you will gain more of it, for the same reason water finds the lowest ground.
None of this requires a national beautification quango, a design tsar, or a five-year strategy document. It requires removing a tax distortion, simplifying a grant form, aiming the money at rooflines and ground floors rather than empty gestures, and putting the cables underground. Britain does not need to be told it could look better. It needs the specific, boring, unglamorous permission structures that would allow it to become so.
Madsen Pirie