Iceni were encouraged to think that ‘beauty’ would enter the discussion about the built environment. Our eager words of the time: “Picture it now: A planning inquiry or appeal where planning inspectors, officers, and your average Joe will be discussing what is aesthetically pleasing.”

But it appears that planning inspectors have little to say on the matter. There are so many other considerations that have a measurable performance indicator. Compare them to this elusive word, it is simply not easy to calibrate.

The late Roger Scrutton devoted a large part of his philosophical thinking to aesthetics. So, he was well placed to discuss with others, beauty in the planning system. The Building Better, Building Beautiful team produced a well-rounded paper on the matter. But many of Scrutton’s assumptions about the demise of beauty can be questioned; it’s the modernist architect’s fault; we are not listening to ordinary people enough….

The strategy of blaming others is common, and it puts further obstacles in the way of solving the problem of making better places. This is evident in the numerous attempts at restructuring the planning system. Exhausted planning system or not, good design requirements have never left the NPPF as a cornerstone of getting planning right.

We are therefore grateful for the sound thought from the planning inspector on the Appeal Ref: APP/A5270/W/21/3268157, Manor Road and Drayton Green Road, London.

“There is I believe something of a tension between identifying a building as an exemplary piece of design which is an objective finding based on established architectural principles, and adorning a building with the epithet ‘beautiful’, which is a subjective one. To my mind, my finding that the building would attain a very high (or exemplary) standard of design is sufficient to justify a conclusion that the proposal does not fall foul of Government advice on the subject in the Framework, the National Design Guide, and the National Model Design Code.”

On reflection there has always been much advice on sound design practice: those the inspector mentions, but there is also the sterling early work of CABE, the TCPA garden villages principles, the Parker Morris standard, Unwin and Parkers’ The Art of Building a Home’. We could even go back as far as Vitruvius ‘firmness, commodity, delight’.

One can conclude from the inspectors’ words all professionals need to get a whole range of parameters right. This in turn, provides the opportunity to lift our spirits, and in so doing ‘beauty’ may emerge as a personal experience. This is not because ‘beauty’ was a forced performance requirement, but because the people who have to live with a place, find some delight in it.