Let me open with an obvious point: Britain doesn’t have enough homes for its ever-growing population. Houses are in such demand that prices remain completely detached from average wages across most of the country; young adults are postponing family formation; and plenty of 20- and 30-year-olds are forced to live a sort of forever adolescence as they stay at home or live in the equivalent of student digs for years.

In response, we rightly hear how the crisis could be eased by an increased programme of house building across the nation. However, I submit we should also give far more attention to our existing housing stock – indeed, to many of the historic buildings this proud nation boasts.

Planning reforms are overdue, and we will need new developments to form part of any lasting solution to our low housing stock. Yet we run the risk of becoming so fixated on building afresh that we neglect the buildings we have. Across the country, Victorian and Georgian properties are falling into disrepair. I live in one – my own Victorian Glasgow tenement is undergoing ruinously expensive repairs at the moment (each of the eight owners has had to pay about 50 per cent of the value of their flats to fix them after decades of inattention from those in charge of the block).

This disregard is visible on any high street in any market town up and down the country, as upper floors above shops remain pretty rotten looking. Council or previously council-owned estates are in a parlous state. Indeed, a recent parliamentary report suggested that bringing historic buildings – including vacant upper floors above shops, former mills and civic buildings – back into use could create as many as 670,000 homes. Meanwhile, around four million homes in England fail the Decent Homes Standard, and nearly 94,000 social homes sit vacant, many awaiting repairs, despite chronic housing shortages. We have become strangely comfortable allowing perfectly serviceable buildings to decay while insisting that the only answer is to pour more concrete on to green fields. 

The pattern is unfortunately not limited to housing. Eight years after the first devastating fire that gutted it, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art is still behind hoardings, and recent headlines suggest it may stay that way. We don’t have the wherewithal or imagination to repair it, despite it arguably being Scotland’s Notre Dame.

We’ve also seen historic churches disappearing at an alarming rate in the UK – over 3,500 churches have closed during the past 15 years or so. There are almost 1,000 churches and chapels in England currently deemed ‘at risk’ because of historical neglect.

The closing down and / or dilapidation of our churches is as clear a symbol we have of Britain’s awkward relationship with its own architectural inheritance. Some of these closed churches have become cafés or libraries, which is fine in its own way. They at least continue to provide a sense of civic togetherness, a congregationalist element.

Some have been converted into mosques. Former churches now cater to Muslim congregations in Stoke-on-Trent, Blackburn, Ipswich and many more places besides. Bradford’s Islamic population is now catered for by a landmark ‘mega mosque’, a conversion of the historic, beautiful and gigantic Heaton Mount university site into the newly minted ‘Mustafa Mount’. It seems that newer non-native religious communities have a confidence that many traditional Christian institutions lack, unable as they are simply to maintain the buildings they already possess.

None of this shows us as a nation willing to conserve its inheritance. We have become willing – or at least passive enough – to accept the really quite rapid disappearance of buildings and attendant institutions that previous generations spent centuries creating. It’s an aesthetic loss, for sure – it’s also an erosion of the character of the places around it, and a weakening of the sense that Britain is a civilisation with something worth preserving.

Conservation is not an indulgence. It is a recognition of the fact that a civilisation will always inherit far more than it creates. As Burke famously argued, society is a partnership ‘between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. Our buildings are a clear expression of that partnership. They show off generational craftsmanship (much of which is also disappearing), reflect local traditions and give us a sense of permanence in a world beset with a feeling of ennui and transience.

It’s no coincidence that Victorian terraces, Georgian crescents and Scottish tenements are some of the country’s most sought-after homes (before we realised the state it was in, my wife and I were besotted by our beautiful flat with all its period features). And they were built to last in a way that modern homes are not, as an architect friend of mine assures me.

Perhaps top of all points in favour of looking after our historic homes, they are already there. We don’t have to carve up greater swathes of the country to house our ever-growing population. As we’ve seen, more than half a million extra homes are already there for the taking, if only we had the will to breathe some life back into them.

So can we please have a conversation about memory in tandem with a conversation on housing? A nation confident in its future (which I would argue we are not, but which we should and could be) will always build the homes it needs for its citizens. A confident nation will also cherish what previous generations have gifted it. In continuing to neglect our architectural inheritance, we should not be surprised when the generations who follow us inherit not only fewer homes, but also a poorer country, less rooted in itself.

James Dixon is a Glasgow-based novelist, poet and playwright.

Few familiar with Westminster City Council will be surprised by its draft proposal to refuse licenses for new pubs and nightclubs unless they ban standing up while having a pint – an activity it calls ‘vertical drinking’. After all, when it comes to petty killjoy regulations, this council has form.

Take its attitude to takeaway pizza. After a blurry night out, I usually sit on the floor, in between the sofa and coffee table, in a relaxed heap, my face as close to the hot, greasy and preferably cheesy food as possible. Coupled with a can of cold Diet Coke, it’s the perfect end to a night out. In the morning, I am immeasurably grateful to myself for the carbs and fluid consumed in this state of nirvana.

Westminster council have found a way to spoil even this in Soho. The pizza restaurant ICCO on Greek Street has a limitation on its licence that dictates it may not sell pizza for takeaway after 11pm. The chain operates two other units, both outside of Westminster’s boundaries, that have no similar restrictions.

Shrief Kamel, creative director at ICCO, has said this causes no end of grief for his staff when the clock strikes 11. Customers line up hoping for a late-night snack, and his embarrassed team has to inform them that there is a ban on boxes. Tourists end their night in London on a sour note, and incredulous residents point to their nearby flats saying, ‘but I live just there’.

On the one night a month that it does operate as a takeaway after 11pm, it has to apply a week in advance and pay a fee for a ‘temporary event notice’. On other evenings, Shrief has encountered licensing officers attending the restaurant to search through bins, checking for timestamps showing takeaway pizza sold after 11pm (always in vain). Customers who do decide to eat in at the few tables the restaurant has aren’t even allowed to take leftovers with them if they depart after 11.

Like other restrictions on venues operating in Soho, the reason cited by the council for this strange ban is the dreaded ‘cumulative impact assessment’ (CIA). This is the method that the council employs to work out what effect a concentration of venues has on the ‘licensing objectives’ handed down to them by the 2003 Licensing Act. Although the Licensing Act isn’t something the council has the power to change, the act does not require the council to maintain use of the CIA (Camden council recently ditched its CIA).

The CIA is the same mechanism that Westminster council used in its draft policy to ban ‘vertical drinking’ in pubs. The policy, which is currently out for consultation, states that there will be a standard presumption to refuse all applications for any new pub or club. However, if space for ‘vertical drinking’ is removed, then the council will consider awarding a licence.

Several Westminster councillors have taken to social media to declare themselves proud ‘vertical’ drinkers, and have consistently denied the claim that this policy amounts to a ban on standing. However, the policy reveals the council’s aversion to ‘alcohol-led’ activities, and it has yet to lay out any substance as to what the policy actually intends. Moving past the faintly comical idea of a nightclub where customers must remain seated, it seems the council has not considered what effect this paragraph would have on prospective publicans. If the intention is really isn’t to ‘reduce the extent of, or to remove opportunities for’ standing in the pub, then why include the passage at all?

Westminster council seems incapable of acknowledging the positive contribution made by Soho’s venues to the reputation of London, the social lives of residents and visitors, or the many jobs they create. Not to mention the revenue these businesses generate for the council. Hospitality is viewed in this area, and I suspect increasingly across the country, as a problem to be managed, not an industry to be encouraged and celebrated.

The licensing officers told me earlier in the summer that they would like more people to engage with the consultation process and to bring their questions and concerns. Well, these are our questions and concerns.

One of the stated objectives of the draft policy is to help reduce social isolation. The British pub must be at the centre of that mission, and the post-night-out debrief over an open pizza box is a close second. The council must change its policy: let people stand, and let them have boxes for crying out loud.

Lucy Rogers is the head of community at Looking for Growth, the political movement to end decline and save Britain.

Has there ever been a dumber clever person than Jolyon Maugham? For someone with a first-class Durham degree who reached the dizzying heights of King’s Counsel, he doesn’t half swallow a lot of bullshit. First he fell for trans-fabulism, becoming one of the noisiest acolytes of the delirious idea that you can have a cock and be a woman. Now he’s fallen for the alleged fabulism of Jason Arday, the disgraced ex-prof famous for his long hair and tall tales.

No sooner had Arday’s thesis and origin story been called into question than Maugham and his nutty Good Law Project were rushing to his defence. The fox-killing, case-losing irritant headed an open letter claiming Arday was the victim of a ‘smear’ campaign by ‘right-wing newspapers’. The claim that Arday plagiarised the work of others is ‘entirely false’, said the letter-signers. It’s ‘racism’, they yelped, as if it were still 2020, as if the cynical deployment of that R-word by bourgeois pricks were still sufficient to tame public discussion. We stand in ‘unwavering solidarity’ with Arday, the letter said.

Turns out their solidarity wasn’t all that unwavering. As the accusations against Arday piled up, causing him to part ways with Cambridge, Maugham engaged in some frantic arse-covering. He wrote a Substack post in which he clings for dear life to the idea that the scrutiny of Arday is racist while also acknowledging he doesn’t know the full story. I’ve been on ‘holiday’, he says (yes, he puts ‘holiday’ in quote marks, because he is far too busy and important to take an actual vacation like you plebs). ‘I do not have the expertise to speculate on what effects [Arday’s] neurodivergence may have had on how he spoke [about his past]’, he writes.

I think this word salad might be the closest thing we’ll ever get to a mea culpa from the turbo-smug likes of Mr Maugham. The class of imperious, insufferable Brexit-allergic bores to which Mr Maugham belongs is never going to say: ‘Okay, okay, we fucked up.’ But they might, once in a while, confess to having ‘lacked the expertise’ to ‘speculate’ so cockily on a ‘matter of public interest’. I wish they’d just admit it – that for all their intellectual pretensions, they are the biggest eejits in Britain, blown this way and that by whatever ideological wind happens to be howling this week.

It’s not just Maugham. Virtually the entire Smart Set (sic) fell for Arday’s alleged grift. From Cambridge to the BBC, from ‘black academia’ to Simon & Schuster, every ivory-tower dweller fawned like a fool over this bloke with an iffy backstory whose academic work consisted of critical-race bollocks about ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘racist’ pop music. The Arday scandal has exposed the breathtaking credulity of the credentialled classes. This is more than the fall of a ‘DEI darling’ – it’s the puncturing, at last, of the fake moral authority of the graduate classes who so love to lord it over the rest of us.

Another member of the smugocracy who fell at Arday’s feet was James O’Brien, the LBC knob jockey who’s built an entire career on being a clever wanker. He, too, rushed to Arday’s defence against the accusations of academic fakery. Later, when more info came out, O’Brien said he felt ‘like a mug’. Well, if the shoe fits. Someone uncovered an old chat between Arday and O’Brien, from 2023, in which the prof gushes for three minutes straight over O’Brien’s history-shaping moral bravery. O’Brien chokes up. In the future, someone’s going to dig up this recording in the rubble of whatever remains of human society and marvel at the sheer arseholery of the 21st century.

O’Brien, of course, once wrote a book called How To Be Right. Yet he’s wrong about pretty much everything. That’s the clever crowd summed up – their arrogance is entirely out of proportion with their intellect. They pose as the singular possessors of moral truth and yet chat shit morning, noon and night. That’s the great service of the Arday scandal – it has ripped away the cultural elites’ veil of enlightenment to reveal the wide-eyed idiocy beneath. The very people who snootily view ordinary people as ‘low-information’ – translation: thick – are themselves the giddy propagators of half-truths, harebrained beliefs and post-scientific drivel. I don’t know about you but I am done with being called stupid by people who believe in lesbians with cocks.

For years, especially following the votes for Brexit and Trump in 2016, Ivy League types wrung their untoiled hands over the dim-witted throng. They came to view the masses as putty in the hands of demagogues, easily swayable by the sophistry of snake-oil populists. Yet show me the Brexiteer who displayed even a fraction of the obsequious devotion shown by Hilary Cremin as she welcomed Arday to Cambridge in 2023. She’s the head of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. She all but bowed as she greeted Arday in front of the cameras and gushed about him being ‘the best in the world’ at what he does, whatever that might be.

The Cambridge elites suspended every one of their critical faculties in the presence of this god-child of DEI, this man who they clearly hoped would wash away Cambridge’s sins of whiteness. It was undiluted demagoguery. The amount of ideological effluent that flows from our universities these days is extraordinary. It was on these leafy quads that trans irrationalism first took root. And where the demented cult of white guilt spread like a pox. And where people would need a lie-down if someone asked them: ‘Where are you from?’ I’ll never forget speaking on campuses in the late 2010s and being told Brexit was a product of mass stupidity by plummy twats who thought it was an act of genocidal erasure to say ‘he’ about a fat bloke in a boob tube.

The more that universities became factories of elite reproduction, the more awash they became with ideological folly. The more they morphed from citadels of knowledge into businesses that inculcate correct-think into the next generation of rulers, the more they’ve fallen victim to the demagogic trickery of wokeness. If we take one lesson from the Arday scandal, let it be that the ‘high information’ elites are far more vulnerable to dogma and delusion than the ‘low information’ working classes. Give me the bawdy scepticism of everyday Britain over the high-minded gibberish of the intellectual classes any day of the week.