With a new Labour government pledging to deliver 1.5 million homes over the next five years, questions are mounting not just about how and where they will be built, but what kinds of places will be created. There is broad consensus that the country needs more housing. Less clear is what the government means by “good design” or how it intends to win public support for large-scale development. Into this vacuum, the ideas of Nicholas Boys Smith remain strikingly relevant, if often divisive.

Boys Smith is not an architect or planner, yet few have shaped recent debates on planning and design as forcefully. Through his social enterprise Create Streets, his work on the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, and his leadership of the now abolished Office for Place, he played a major role in influencing built environment policy under the previous government and helped reframe the conversation around what good urbanism looks like. At the same time, he has drawn criticism from parts of the design community, many of whom view his advocacy of traditional and popular styles with deep suspicion.

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