Something has quietly changed in our towns and cities over the past few decades. Department stores that once anchored everyday civic life have vanished. High streets have hollowed out, replaced by retail parks that look identical whether you are in Croydon or the Midlands. New buildings seem to rise every month in such an efficient, compliant and forgettable manner that we scarcely notice them at all. This is not simply nostalgia – something deeper is at stake.
The late philosopher Sir Roger Scruton warned that when things are designed only for utility, they paradoxically become useless. “Put usefulness first,” he observed, “and you will lose it. Put beauty first, and what you get will be used forever.” A world built solely for function eventually fails us, because human beings are not purely functional creatures.
For most of human history, form and function were not rivals. A church, a market hall or a family home was expected to work, of course, but also to delight. Buildings were meant to endure and age well, proving that beauty was not a luxury added at the end but part of the overarching purpose in the first place.
This intuition has been deeply woven into Catholic culture, with the Church long understanding that architecture is not merely a neutral backdrop but something that has the potential to be formative and transformative. Sacred spaces were designed to direct the senses towards the divine, to teach through proportion, light and material what words alone could not. Beauty elevated worship precisely because it acknowledged that we encounter God not as disembodied minds but as embodied creatures, formed by what we see and inhabit, and sensorily drawn towards truth, goodness and love.
Historically, wealth and responsibility went hand in hand. Homeowners took pride in their “kerb appeal” and philanthropists invested in churches, schools and civic buildings not merely as acts of charity but as expressions of stewardship. London is a living museum of this mindset. Think of Sir John Soane, who designed his own home as an educational gift to the public: a space dedicated to beauty, learning and posterity rather than profit. Such projects were acts of confidence in the future, rooted in the belief that beauty implicitly shapes its surrounding inhabitants’ virtue and wellbeing.
Modern planning, however, has largely inverted this logic. Efficiency, speed and cost-cutting dominate decision-making; streets are designed for traffic flow rather than encounter and awe; and buildings are value-engineered to the bare minimum. Even some churches have absorbed this mindset, embracing stripped-back interiors, temporary materials and designs that prioritise flexibility over reverence.
As a society, we tend to think of beauty as decorative: subjective, indulgent or optional. Catholic thought has always insisted otherwise. Beauty is one of the transcendentals, alongside and equal to truth and goodness. It is not an add-on but a way in which reality communicates meaning. To encounter beauty is not merely to enjoy something aesthetically pleasing but to glimpse order, harmony and purpose.
When beauty disappears from our everyday lives, it quietly affects our interior world. A culture formed by disposable spaces and interchangeable places struggles to form stable people. If nothing around us is meant to last, we subtly absorb the message that we, too, are transient and, at its extreme, disposable.
This is why the loss of beauty in ordinary settings matters. High streets and department stores once offered a shared sense of local community and identity. Today’s retail parks, by contrast, communicate efficiency without belonging. We arrive, we consume, we transact and we leave.
We see this even in the smallest details of our built environments. Street lamps, bollards, benches and signage were once designed with care. Today they are often purely utilitarian: harshly lit, standardised and designed to deter rather than welcome. Public furniture no longer invites lingering or conversation; it serves to manage movement and enforce compliance. These objects may seem insignificant, but they quietly teach us that public space is not meant to be enjoyed, only passed through.
As bold a statement as it may sound, architecture in some ways teaches us how to live. When it is hurried, indifferent and unnoticeable, the temptation is that we become so too.
It is encouraging, then, that some voices are pushing back. Initiatives such as Create Streets, a UK-based urban design thinktank, argue – with data as well as philosophy – that beauty is not the enemy of progress. Founded out of frustration with the poor quality of recent developments, Create Streets researches the links between urban form and wellbeing, health, sustainability and social cohesion. Their work confirms what many instinctively know: people flourish in places that are walkable and beautiful.
This is not a call for sentimentality or freezing time but to respect scale, materials and continuity, drawing on the accumulated wisdom of how human beings have successfully – and stunningly – built places for centuries. Beauty, properly understood, is not against development, progress or ease – it is what makes development worth doing in the first place.
That is why the Church has something vital to say: not because she is a museum of the past but because she understands the human person. Catholic anthropology insists that we are formed by what we see, touch and inhabit. This is why liturgy takes place in a particular space; why prayer involves posture; it is why the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass engages our senses. A beautiful church can start teaching visitors its theology before one word is spoken.
To defend beauty, then, is not aesthetic nostalgia but an act of faith: a resistance to the tyranny of optimisation and an insistence that craftsmanship and reverence honour our Creator. As Pope Benedict XVI reminded us, artists – and by extension architects and builders – “enamoured of beauty” do not distract from faith but deepen it, creating spaces that lift our souls towards God.
In an age obsessed with optimisation, speed and disposability, beauty insists on patience, craftsmanship and permanence. It resists the tyranny of immediate usefulness and reminds us that some things are valuable simply because they are beautiful.
We should not be surprised that a world stripped of beauty feels increasingly anxious, restless and dissatisfied. A life lived entirely among spaces that do not care whether we are there – enjoying them or not – will struggle to feel meaningful to any of us. By contrast, to inhabit places shaped with intention and grace is to be quietly affirmed in the knowledge that we matter, we belong and that all man-made beauty was made with our good in mind.
While beauty may not solve every societal problem, without it we quietly lose something essential: our sense of what it means to be human, to participate as co-creators and our ability to delight in God’s world.
The war on beauty has never been formally declared, but it unfolds incrementally – through planning decisions, budget cuts and the slow lowering of expectations and cultural taste. And the consequences are as spiritual as they are tangibly aesthetic. To defend beauty, then, is not to indulge taste but to safeguard human flourishing.
