There is a PhD to be written on how it came to be that the concept of ‘beauty’ should have become so prominent in the world of planning and homebuilding. Right now, Thomas Heatherwick regales us with a book and radio series on ‘bland, vague and forgettable’ architecture - a ‘global epidemic of inhuman buildings’. In 2020 the late Sir Roger Scruton gave us ‘Living with Beauty’, the report of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, taken up in part by Robert Jenrick in his ill-fated ‘once in a generation’ review of the planning system.