Foreign Policy > England

As humans, we need beauty in our surroundings to thrive and feel at home.

Lars Møller | April 30, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: London, a view from the River Thames, with St Paul’s Cathedral (Antonio Joli, undated)

Walking through London nowadays with your gaze raised above the crowd, you may wonder what has become of beauty. Not beauty as a decorative afterthought, nor as a subjective indulgence, but beauty as an ordering principle of the world that we build—a visible testament to our desire to belong, to dwell, and to affirm that life, even in its transience, is worthy of grace. The question is equally aesthetic and moral.

There was a time when London would have answered that very question with unpretentious confidence. Its streets unfolded according to an implicit logic that reached beyond the purely utilitarian, suggesting something unique and infinitely precious: civilization. Proportion, symmetry, and ornament were never imposed as luxuries; they arose from a shared understanding that the built environment is an extension of the human soul. Around St Paul’s Cathedral, before the Blitz, you would encounter not only a masterpiece of architectural composition, but also a setting that truly acknowledged its presence—streets that deferred, facades that conversed, spaces that prepared the eye and the heart for a solemn spectacle. 

Like on the continent, the cultural rupture arrived in the wake of WWII. Yet it is essential to speak plainly: the war destroyed buildings, but it did not target beauty. What followed, however, did exactly that. In the name of progress, a generation of planners and architects set aside the accumulated wisdom of centuries, as though it were a burden rather than a gift. The city became not an inheritance to be tended, as it were, but a “problem” to be solved.

In Paris, by comparison, the farsighted guardians of the city—despite modern pressures—understood that........

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