The Office for Place has come and gone. It was a scion of the Conservative government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, whose 2020 report, Living with Beauty, made 45 or so quite sensible recommendations — if perhaps rather too many — on how to go about better placemaking. The last of these was to set up an organisation to monitor the delivery of the rest.

Thus, after a huge effort from interim chair Nicolas Boys Smith, the Office for Place was born earlier this year, established as an arm’s-length body reporting to what is now the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on its remit “to create beautiful, successful and enduring places that foster a sense of community, local pride and belonging” – motherhood and apple pie, or so you might think.

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