Can we plan it to be B********?

‘The ostracism of beauty extends to every corner of public policy. With the single exception of "areas of outstanding natural beauty" (nature being splendid only in specific places), the word beauty does not appear in statute law. The most ubiquitous sphere of policy, development control and land-use planning, averts its eye from beauty, despite that concept having been its catalyst in the ribbon sprawl of 1930s England. It worries over plot ratios, materials and proportion. The conservation movement deals in antiquity, rarity and chemistry. Historic buildings are about heritage, architecture and dates …Such nihilism has justified the political right in opposing arts subsidies as market distortion, and the left in opposing them as subjective and elitist.

Everyone senses beauty. In this delayed and demented spring, millions of people have driven out of towns to see snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils. They take and buy pictures of them. A few will mutter lines from Wordsworth. Summer will see a surge of visits to museums and galleries, to country houses and parks, to dales and peaks, to old villages and towns. In cities people will crowd into the few surviving old quarters, for the simple reason that they find them more beautiful than the new ones. They do not flock to London Wall or Canary Wharf, Moss Side or Milton Keynes. They know what they mean by beautiful, even if they have never been to the Courtauld or the Royal College of Art. By far the largest art college in Britain is that supplied every day by guides to museums and country houses, most of them volunteers …The collapse of town and country planning through the ban on "value judgments" by planning authorities does permanent damage to townscape and countryside’.

Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian.

 

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