Thinktank calls on Labour to rediscover early socialists’ commitment to beauty
A new report from Policy Exchange, a centre-right thinktank, has called on Labour to embrace ‘beauty’ as a key plank of its growth and housebuilding programme. It follows the recent announcement that references to the beauty agenda – a key priority of the previous Conservative government – would be removed from the National Planning Policy Framework, to be replaced by a commitment instead to “high-quality design”.
Titled Beauty and Socialism: How the Left can put Beauty back into Britain, the Policy Exchange report is authored by former BD architectural correspondent Ike Ijeh. It makes the case that, rather than being the preserve of the political right, ‘beauty’ was a key priority of early socialists such as William Morris.
Ijeh claims that “beauty is not simply about making things prettier, but… delves deep into a proud Labour heritage of seeking to improve living and working conditions for the poor while giving them unfettered access to the quality, refinement, and resilience that less progressive ideologies had historically reserved for the rich.”
The Tories’ commitment to beauty in the built environment, spearheaded by former Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Michael Gove, had grown out of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. The commission, co-chaired by Roger Scruton and Nicholas Boys Smith, had argued that embracing beauty could help break down resistance to new housing. At the time, regular BD columnist David Rudlin wrote: “the term beauty still grates at times but it has, in reality, been useful in drawing a wider constituency into a discussion about aesthetics”.
The report argues that Labour should be wary of repeating what it describes as the mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s, when it claims both main political parties prioritised a “dash for units” over a commitment to creating enduringly beautiful housing and places.
In his introduction to the report, former Labour MP John Cruddas describes the post-war era as a period when “Instead of using beauty to humanise mass development and stitch housing into the fabric of its local community, history, and identity, it was instead discarded in favour of an intransigent utilitarian orthodoxy that saw the mechanistic provision of as many housing units as possible.”
The debate about the architectural and social legacy of modernism and the post-war period has been a longstanding point of contention in British public life. Despite widespread public dislike for much mid-century British modernist housing and architecture, many architects continue to defend what they view as the period’s underlying commitment to meeting society’s social needs.
According to the new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities, and Local Government, Angela Rayner, Labour’s decision to ditch ‘beauty’ from the NPPF was because beauty was “too subjective” a term.
>> Also read: RIBA and Design Council applaud ‘Building Beautiful’ findings
>> Also read: Scruton’s beauty report is an unexpected joy
The report describes the move away from beauty as a “grave mistake”, with Ijeh going on to argue that “Beauty not only underpins the shared civic inheritance of a built environment that should generally improve rather than worsen over time, but is also a founding principle of the early socialism on which the entire Labour movement was built.”
The decision by Labour to ditch the previous government’s beauty agenda was welcomed recently by RIBA President Muyiwa Oki, who said: “It can cause confusion because something that’s beautiful to one person can be not beautiful to another. That’s why we want to focus on the language of high quality and embed that into the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).”
A second Policy Exchange report, titled Provably Popular Homes: Holding Developers to Account with Systematic Beauty Polling, has been published in parallel and advocates for the introduction of a new polling mechanism to gauge public approval of new buildings. Policy Exchange claims that such polling would be “a vital tool in getting Britain building and creating a blueprint for high-quality, beautiful, popular buildings that have public support.”
>> Also read: Government publishes new model design code to ‘bring back beauty’
>> Also read: Is this the end of the road for ‘beauty’? Labour’s National Planning Policy Framework revisions explained
William Morris and early English socialism
William Morris, a key figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, was also a pioneering socialist in 19th-century England. Deeply influenced by his dismay at industrialisation’s impact on society and the environment, Morris advocated for a return to craftsmanship and the integration of beauty into everyday life. He believed that art and design should serve the needs of all people, not just the elite, and saw beauty as essential to a just society. His socialist ideals intertwined with his artistic vision, promoting the creation of beautiful, functional spaces that uplifted both the worker and the community.
Morris famously advised his readers, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,” emphasising the importance of surrounding oneself with both practicality and aesthetic value.
In Hopes and Fears for Art, he wrote that “nothing made by man’s hand can be indifferent: it must be either beautiful and elevating, or ugly and degrading,” and “that people who are over-anxious about the outward expression of beauty becoming too great a force among the other forces of life, would, if they had had the making of the external world, have been afraid of making an ear of wheat beautiful, lest it should not have been good to eat.”
Early English socialists, inspired by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, viewed housing and architecture as crucial to their vision of a just society. This vision also influenced Ebenezer Howard, who was inspired by socialist and anarchist ideas to develop the concept of garden cities. Howard’s garden cities aimed to combine the best of urban and rural living, creating self-sustaining communities with ample green space, designed to foster social equality and a high quality of life for all residents.
Many left-wing leaders and theortists of the early twentieth century believed that beauty should be a right for all, not just the wealthy, and that aesthetics should be integrated with functionality in everyday living spaces. Labour leader Keir Hardie admired Bournville, seeing it as a model for a socialist Britain, where well-designed homes and green spaces uplifted workers.
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