Beauty for the many, not the few?

With

Professor Dinah Birch CBE
Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool

Jon Cruddas MP
MP for Dagenham and Rainham

Lord Glasman
Labour peer and director of the Common Good Foundation

Tristram Hunt
Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and former Labour MP

Lisa Nandy MP
MP for Wigan

chaired by
 
Jack Airey
Head of Housing, Policy Exchange

About the Event

How can more people be provided a beautiful place to call home? Pioneered by the work of John Ruskin, British Socialists have long had a vision for answering this question. In this panel debate we will ask what that vision is today – and how beauty can be for the many, not the few.

The event followed Policy Exchange research on this issue which has shown the public, particularly lower-income groups, want a more beautiful built environment –and that there is a national consensus on what it should look like. It also followed an essay by Jon Cruddas MP for Policy Exchange’s recent Building Beautiful essay collection on ‘Beauty and a romantic left’, which argued there is a revival in the romantic tradition on the modern Left.