Philip Booth: The planning system can be liberalised in a conservative way

Allowing developers to negotiate at a very local level to provide compensation directly to the community would factor in beauty, practicality and social costs.

Will Heaven and Jack Airey: Popular architecture is the answer to NIMBYism

By giving local communities more control, and broadening the scope of government priorities to include quality and design, we can get Britain building.

Alex Morton: Five housing reforms that we need to implement straight away

Given the long lead times involved in constructing new homes, we can’t afford to let the Government’s weakness or distracted state delay us.

Nicholas Boys-Smith: Housebuilding needs a direct planning revolution

The second piece in our mini-series on housing argues that the planning system needs a far greater focus on buildings that people like.

Mark Winterburn: We must build better, as well as more, homes

We sometimes forget the downside of Macmillan’s legacy – rushed housing that later cost a fortune to put right.

Hayes’ speech on beauty in transport: full text

“Some who did the damage to our country were crass and careless. But some wrought monstrous havoc knowingly, wilfully. All of them Philistines. Well now the Philistines have met their David.”

How modernist architects justify unpopular buildings 

Abstraction has its place – in modern art that no one is forced to look at or an experimental novel that no one has to read.