Soft-Play Britain

On X, you see the little impulses and fixations that ani§mate the people who actually run Britain. And time and again, the revelation is the same. The people who speak most grandly about “doing things” and “growth” in practice, to be obsessed with cycling infrastructure, shopfront beautification, pedestrianisation and the general moral necessity of making places look a bit nicer.

No government has embodied this dissonance more perfectly than Starmer’s. The promise was of restored standards in public life fused to technocratic seriousness: growth, competence, a bright (and green) industrial future, perhaps even a faint revival of that old Blairite hum of modernisation. This vision could not, at least initially, be laughed out the room. Unlike the stagnant 2010s, the world has begun to recover some sense of technological momentum, above all in artificial intelligence and in space: NASA’s Artemis II mission launched on 1^st April, and this week completed the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17.

Yet the reality of the Starmtrooper’s ambition is far more often the moral and aesthetic world of the municipal functionary: traffic management, frontage improvements, “public realm” tidying, and an endless preoccupation with making everything feel safer, softer, and more convivial. Millennials were the first generation to invent the “kidult”, so it makes sense that they should wish to turn the streetscape into a kind of giant soft-play area.

Ben Judah is a useful specimen of the type. Here is a man presented, not without reason, as serious: a writer, a policy thinker, a former special adviser, plainly committed to his own sincerity and not easily accused of intellectual idleness. His magnum opus This Is London was an ambitious work of immersive reportage, the product of real effort and real curiosity about the city’s underworld. This is not, in other words, a man unacquainted with the wider world, nor incapable of thinking on a larger scale. That is precisely what makes the contrast so revealing. When Judah is left to his own casual observations, his imaginations of alternate futures contracts at once to the level of streetscape anxiety: defended cycle lanes, beautified frontages, the fear that without prohibiting private motor traffic he cannot bike his son around Camberwell without being “smashed.” As a Camberwell resident of 35 years, I confess I found this existential alarm about Camberwell Green junction a little overdrawn, given bus lanes and 20mph limits are already in place.

Likewise, the demand to “harmonise” the high street through standardised frontages and a general scheme of cosiness is really just another form of Potemkin regeneration. There is nothing wrong, of course, with insisting that shops take down the worst of the garish LEDs and peeling Lyca Mobile stickers. But this is a solution that turns its back on the problem: a cash-only Turkish barbers in a Farrow & Ball paint scheme is still a cash-only Turkish barbers. 

A cash-only Turkish barbers in a Farrow & Ball paint scheme is still a cash-only Turkish barbers

Likewise, the original ambition of the 15-minute city was plainly a vision of the high street restored to some idealised social function: butcher, grocer, café, perhaps a pub, a little ecology of daily life stitched back together after decades of decline. But that world cannot be summoned into existence by repainting shutters and standardising signage. You do not re-engineer community by giving atomisation a heritage colour palette.

The problem with “good urbanism” as it now circulates in Britain is that, like so many bad ideas, it arrives as an American import and is then crudely adapted to local conditions. As The Critic has already argued, the concept comes freighted with an American hostility to car-dependent suburban life, but without much regard for the very different social geography of Britain. Its weakness is most obvious in the case of pedestrianisation and the broader family of traffic-calming schemes with which it is usually bundled. The issue is not simply that these measures are unpopular, but that they are rarely constructive in any serious architectural or urbanistic sense. 

There is no attempt to Haussmannise these “safe streets”, nor any attempt to redesign them in a register that never envisaged the motor car in the first place. Instead, what you get is a road pinched off at the edges, policed either by rotting planters and unpainted trellises or by cameras which, naturally, catch only the law-abiding motorist rather than the rickshaws and converted electric motorcycles. At that point the rhetoric of “better urban living” gives way to the reality of restriction. The motorist is constrained first; the promised transformation never really arrives.

That is why these schemes so often feel less like urbanism and more managed irritation: not a positive vision of how to build better places, but a negative politics of making existing habits harder. In practice, as Chris Bayliss notes, the supposed policy substance often dissolves into a motte-and-bailey: the attractive claim that everyone should live near life’s necessities, followed by silence when asked how those amenities are actually to be made economically viable where they do not already exist.

Kenneth Clarke once said that he could not define civilisation in abstract terms, but that one of its marks was confidence: the confidence that allowed a Roman aqueduct to be built beautifully because its builders assumed it would endure. Our urbanists do not exactly lack confidence: what they lack is seriousness. Trafalgar Square must host some moronic installation on the Fourth Plinth, its open space must be broken up into stacked tasks and areas of designated use, handed over to “communities” and don’t even think about sitting on the Lions like your granddad did. Even Canary Wharf, for a long time one of the last physical expressions of serious British power (in financial terms at least) is now talked about as a candidate for ornamental re-enchantment, with HSBC’s tower imagined as a kind of garden structure, sprouting performative greenery from its sides. The instinct is not to preserve, still less to build monumentally, but to soften: to treat authority and scale as things that must be apologised for.

A society that cannot build grandly will not think grandly for long. A society that is embarrassed by monumentality will end by being embarrassed by power, wealth, command, and achievement. That is the real quarrel here. Not with a bike lane, nor a planter, nor even the latest act of public-realm infantilisation, but with an entire governing instinct that mistrusts hardness, scale, and splendour.