Ugly buildings are a health issue - make London beautiful again

THERE’S a problem. Almost everyone can feel it. The outsides of most new buildings are soulless and depressing. Except for a few exceptions, most of them are boring.

- Thomas Heatherwick

Boring is not about whether a building is traditional or modern, curved or square, iconic or everyday. It’s about an absence of visual complexity.

To be really clear, what I’m talking about is the outsides of buildings. Typically, in my experience, the interiors of most new buildings are pretty good. But these interiors are often paired with a street presence devoid of any interest; which is weird because every day a thousand times more people pass by the outside of a building than the inside.

You might be thinking this is just a sentimental, backward-looking, moan about the absence of “niceness”. But it’s much more problematic than that.

There’s now scientific evidence showing that plain, flat, featureless buildings profoundly affect our mental health. They lead to physical and societal problems. They cause serious stress to people’s brains and bodies.

The impact of boring buildings on the environment then takes that problem to another level. Buildings that nobody loves get demolished and replaced, and demolished and replaced, over and over again, because nobody cares.