Felix Hardinge has a fine Critic piece on what he calls Soft-Play Britain, the shallow and superficial urban schemes which go no further than trying to make the place look a bit nicer.
Soft-Play Britain
Britain’s governing class talks of growth and grandeur but focuses on planters and paint schemes
On X, you see the little impulses and fixations that ani§mate [sic] 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 1st 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.
The whole piece is well worth reading as anyone paying attention here in the UK must see such kidult streetscape schemes all over the place.
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.
Britain’s governing class talks of growth and grandeur but focuses on planters and paint schemes
On X, you see the little impulses and fixations that ani§mate [sic] 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 1st 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.
The whole piece is well worth reading as anyone paying attention here in the UK must see such kidult streetscape schemes all over the place.
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.
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