This government is hellbent on building ugly homes, and it’s a scandal, says James Price Of all the many, many mistakes the new Labour government has already made in office, the one that forced a mirthless laugh turned out not to be a mistake at all. The draft of the new National Policy Planning Framework (the bible for housing nerds across Britain) was published with track changes still present throughout the document. What a funny error, we chuckled.
But it turns out that these are always published this way to make it easier to respond to. Whilst Sam Dumitriu of Britain Remade has an incredible piece of analysis of what the changes and edits tell us about the minutiae of the policy; I was much more interested in a few small excisions. The words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ had been deleted seven times.
One headline used to say ‘Achieving well-designed and beautiful places’ – now those places need not be beautiful. It was a removal that would have been deeply embarrassing if it had accidentally been made known – that it was published with the intention of signalling that beauty is no longer a priority when it comes to building houses is downright barbaric. Sure, industry bodies might support this change by arguing that the rules are too vague and that they fail to define beauty.
But to dismiss it as an unimportant concept goes against our very nature, and millennia of intellectual endeavour to both understand and appreciate the importance of aesthetics in archi.