The North is about to be built upon again.
New homes are promised. Regeneration schemes are advancing. Mayoral authorities are acquiring greater powers, cities are assembling investment plans and West Yorkshire is preparing for a mass-transit system intended to reshape how more than two million people move around the region.
The pressure will be to deliver - quickly, economically and at scale.
But amid the targets, business cases and planning timetables, Abigail Scott Paul believes a fundamental question is not being asked loudly enough: what will it feel like to live among the things we build?
“There’s not much of a design conversation happening in the North of England,” she told MagNorth recently.
“In London, you do get a design conversation. But around the North, where is that conversation happening?
“There is a huge opportunity, but there is also a risk. If we don’t bring design expertise in, we could end up with generic development that could be anywhere.”
Scott Paul is the global head of Humanise, a ten-year campaign calling for buildings and cities that are more interesting, characterful and attentive to human needs.
It emerged from Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World, the 2023 book by designer Thomas Heatherwick, and is run from Heatherwick Studio in London. But Scott Paul’s own route into the campaign has travelled through architecture, poverty, cultural policy and the complicated work of ensuring that people who are frequently spoken about are also heard.
She worked in the press office of the Royal Institute of British Architects around the turn of the millennium, when British cities were pursuing landmark cultural projects and dreaming of replicating the transformative “Bilbao effect” of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum.
She subsequently spent more than a decade at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, much of it considering how stories about poverty could be told without reducing the people living through it to convenient case studies. More recently, she served as director of external relations and strategic partnerships for Leeds 2023 Year of Culture.
Humanise brings those worlds together.
“I’m not an architect, although I have worked in and around architecture, design and cities for most of my career,” she says.
“At Joseph Rowntree Foundation, I was doing a lot of work on how you tell a new story about people trapped in poverty that can build political and public support for change.
“When I was approached for this job, I came to it very much from the question: how can we design our cities in a way that benefits people most?”
Humanise is deliberately unafraid of the word “boring”.
It argues that towns and cities across the world are succumbing to a “blandemic”: the spread of flat, repetitive and anonymous buildings that give little to the people passing them and say almost nothing about the places in which they have landed.
Yet boring, in this context, doesn't simply mean aesthetically unfashionable.
The word emerged repeatedly during research commissioned for the campaign’s launch, when 2,000 people around the UK were asked about the buildings surrounding them.
“We’re not talking about beauty and ugliness, because those terms can be subjective,” Scott Paul explains. “An ugly building can still hold your interest.
“We’re talking about bland, soulless development - development that almost blanks the people walking past it because there’s nothing for them to look at.”
A “human” building need not conform to an approved historical style. It might communicate through colour, texture, ornament, materials, depth, an unusual silhouette or small details around a doorway. What matters is its relationship with the person encountering it, particularly at eye level.
Too often, Scott Paul says, buildings are presented through aerial photographs and swooping promotional films. The lived city is different. It is experienced from a pavement, moving at walking pace, alongside walls, windows and entrances.
“There are design qualities we’re talking about: texture, materiality, ornamentation or detail - something at a human scale that can be appreciated by you.
“But a more humanised approach to development also means focusing on outcomes that boost our human experience: belonging, pride, and generating a place where people want to hang out because they feel good around it.”
This emphasis upon exteriors is not an argument that warmth, space, natural light, ventilation or the internal quality of a home do not matter. It is an attempt to draw attention to a part of our shared environment that Humanise believes has been neglected.
Scott Paul describes the outsides of buildings as “the walls of public life”.
An office might be occupied by a few hundred employees. A shop will be entered by a proportion of the people moving along its street. But its exterior is experienced by everybody who passes, regardless of whether they have permission, money or reason to go inside.
“There are many more people walking past,” she says. “For the flash offices, ordinary people walking in the city may never go inside and experience them.
“It is not either-or. We’re focusing on one piece of the urban-design jigsaw that hasn’t really been talked about.”
The campaign’s argument is supported by a global evidence review, commissioned by Humanise and published in April.
Authored by Dr Anna Kim, it brings together more than 80 studies from neuroscience, cognitive science, environmental psychology, urban design and place-based research.
The review reports associations between external building design and measurable responses involving attention, mood, memory, heart rate, skin conductance and stress recovery. Stark repetition, excessive enclosure and featureless reflective glass have been associated in some studies with increased stress or reduced emotional engagement. Organised complexity - variation held together by rhythm, balance or pattern - appears easier and more rewarding for the brain to process than either monotony or visual chaos.
Researchers have also used eye-tracking to examine where people look. Detail, depth and articulation at human height tend to attract greater attention than blank surfaces.
One study involving infants and adults found a preference for façades containing a particular form of organised visual richness. That's intriguing, but it doesn't provide a simple biological rulebook for good architecture.
The evidence review is explicit about the field’s limitations. Many studies have small samples, narrow geographical scope or isolate a single design variable from the social complexity of a real street. Neuroarchitecture also lacks a shared theoretical framework through which findings can be consistently compared.
Scott Paul is careful not to present the science as complete.
“The research is emerging,” she says. “We’re hoping through the campaign that we can start to build a more comprehensive picture of how buildings are impacting human health and wellbeing.
“We’re not arguing for a particular style of architecture. We’re saying that if we know visually engaging buildings on our streets can help us feel better, why wouldn’t we design for that?”
The proposition is not that a decorative façade can compensate for an unaffordable, overcrowded or poorly insulated home. Buildings can't solve poverty, loneliness or mental ill health by themselves.
But they can form one part of the environmental conditions within which those problems are experienced.
“We can’t pretend to solve the world’s problems through the design of buildings,” Scott Paul explains. “They are one element.
“It is almost like a mindset shift: emotion being a function of design, and thinking about the impact of buildings on people’s lives and wellbeing.
“We’re talking about buildings being part of the public-health infrastructure.”
At Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Scott Paul saw how the design of housing could either reinforce social division or quietly challenge it.
She points to Derwenthorpe, the mixed-tenure development created by the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust on the edge of York. Its socially rented and privately owned homes were designed without an obvious visual hierarchy between them.
“You can’t tell who is in a social house and who is in a privately owned one, because there’s no difference,” she says.
“I thought that was a really clever way to take away stigma - to show dignity and care for the people who need it.”
That experience informs one of Humanise’s most important arguments: engaging and distinctive places shouldn't be reserved for those who can afford to buy their way into them.
The loss of industry, long-term underinvestment and unequal access to infrastructure have left physical marks on northern communities. A neglected high street or cheaply assembled housing estate can communicate more than economic difficulty. It can suggest that ambition, delight and civic attention have been allocated elsewhere.
“There is spatial inequality,” Scott Paul says. “There are communities that have been left behind.
“Humanise is about the places that need it most. There shouldn’t be an absence of joy for people who need it most.
“Everyone deserves a decent place to call home. Everyone deserves decent streets to walk home through at night.”
Care can't be applied to a place cosmetically. Hanging baskets and attractive paving will not resolve insecure employment, hollowed-out public services or property ownership that allows important buildings to decay.
But the physical city still participates in social life. It can help people feel recognised, oriented and connected - or deepen the impression that nobody with power is paying attention.
Britain urgently needs more homes. It needs them at rents and prices people can afford, and it needs them far sooner than the country’s development system generally manages to provide them.
Does insisting upon character introduce another expense, delay or planning obstacle?
Scott Paul rejects the assumption that housing quantity and human experience must be placed in opposition.
“We should start from a hopeful, ambitious position and not from the bare minimum,” she says. “The moment you start from the bare minimum, you are setting yourself up for failure.
“We need 1.5 million new homes, but they shouldn’t be rubbish ones that don’t make people feel valued or give them a sense of character and identity.”
Character doesn't necessarily require an extravagant budget. Humanise argues that limited resources can be concentrated where most people encounter a building: around its doors, ground floor and relationship with the street. A change in materials, depth, colour, signage or the design of a canopy can alter that encounter without turning an ordinary housing development into a costly architectural spectacle.
“I think the cost narrative is a bit stuck,” Scott Paul says.
“We’re a creative nation. We have the tools to make incredible things. I don’t think it is beyond our wit to work out how to do this affordably.”
The campaign must still prove that case. Materials require maintenance. Details can be removed through “value engineering” as schemes move from an architect’s drawings towards construction. Developers operate within land values, funding conditions and demands for a commercial return.
Scott Paul believes more work is needed to demonstrate the economic value of places where people want to remain: increased footfall, stronger local business and buildings sufficiently valued to be retained rather than demolished after a few decades.
There are developers, she says, who already understand that responsibility. She points to Capital&Centric’s reuse of difficult former industrial sites and the regeneration of Manchester’s Mayfield depot as examples of development drawing meaning from what was there before.
“Some developers quite rightly get a bad rap,” she says. “But there are others investing in communities over the long term who want to do something special.”
The North also complicates any straightforward campaign against Modernism.
Park Hill in Sheffield has inspired anger, affection, academic debate and a major programme of redevelopment. Its concrete scale is intimidating to some and treasured by others. Like many post-war estates, the story of what happened there can't be separated from maintenance, housing policy, economic change and the lives of its residents.
Humanise, Scott Paul insists, isn't demanding pitched roofs and ornamental brickwork everywhere.
“Some Brutalist buildings are incredibly interesting,” she says. “We’re trying not to get into a style war.
“It is the proliferation of boxes that comes from stripping all the detail and character out. They are not brilliant Modernist buildings by any stretch of the imagination.
“We talk about fast food and fast fashion. This is a kind of fast architecture.”
The campaign’s own recent walking guide to King’s Cross supports that broader interpretation. Its selection ranges from the Gothic exuberance of St Pancras to a 1970 Brutalist building, Victorian industrial structures and contemporary work. The common quality is not style but the ability to reward attention.
Its accompanying Spotter’s Guide encourages people to notice buildings at city, street and doorway distance: looking for silhouette and identity from afar, rhythm and variation while approaching, then craft and detail close enough to touch.
Scott Paul sees Bradford as a place of particular possibility. Its centre holds extraordinary architectural inheritance alongside ambitious plans for new housing and the continuing question of how regeneration benefits existing communities.
Leeds has its arcades, Corn Exchange and richly detailed commercial streets, but no longer has the city architect role once occupied by John Thorp. Humanise is calling for city architects to return at a strategic level: people able to examine individual developments as contributions to a larger civic story.
Manchester demonstrates what sustained political focus and investment can achieve, although the character of its rapid redevelopment remains contested. Sheffield must find ways for new neighbourhoods to acknowledge both its industrial history and the people making the city now.
The opportunity extends beyond buildings.
West Yorkshire’s proposed mass-transit system will eventually require stops, structures, signs and public spaces across the region. These could be selected from a catalogue and placed almost anywhere. Or they could become an expression of West Yorkshire itself.
“The trams and tram stops shouldn’t look as though they could be anywhere else in the world,” Scott Paul says.
“Porto and Lisbon have trams that are iconic symbols of those places. Let’s do something like that.”
The power to demand more rests partly with developers, landowners and planning authorities. Metro mayors can establish the ambitions against which development is assessed. Architects can translate those ambitions into form.
But Humanise believes the third source of power must be the public.
Conventional planning consultation is frequently adversarial and arrives after the most important decisions have already been made. Documents are technical, timescales limited and meetings dominated by those with sufficient confidence and availability to attend.
Scott Paul wants a much broader social conversation about place. She points to urban rooms - accessible spaces where people can examine and discuss proposals - and to artists, writers and filmmakers who can help communities articulate what matters without extracting their experiences for somebody else’s project.
At Morecambe, Humanise commissioned a sand artist to construct a series of deliberately bland castles on the beach. The absurd objects gave people an immediate route into discussing the town, its remarkable architectural inheritance and the future they wanted regeneration to create.
“People haven’t really had the language to express these things because they haven’t been in the room where the discussions happen,” she says.
“We know what people don’t want. What comes next will involve subjective taste, but the campaign is trying to say that bland isn’t good enough. We can do better. Let’s have a conversation about it.”
Humanise is still a young campaign. It wants to engage ten million people globally and produce demonstrable examples of development shaped by its principles. Its success will ultimately depend upon whether compelling language about joy survives contact with land prices, procurement, planning and political urgency.
But its central demand is difficult to dismiss: the people who experience buildings every day should count when those buildings are commissioned.
The North doesn't lack architectural character. It possesses medieval streets, Victorian civic ambition, industrial ingenuity, Modernist experiments and countless small acts of adaptation. What it risks losing is the confidence to create contemporary places with comparable distinctiveness.
As new homes, transport infrastructure and urban neighbourhoods arrive, the question isn't whether every building will be loved. No democratic city could promise agreement of that kind.
The question is whether anybody thought it mattered.
Scott Paul reduces the campaign’s ambition to one sentence.
“Everybody deserves to live in a place that they love being in,” she confirms.
“And being around.”
Header image: Dave Martin, part of the sand artist group 'Sand in Your Eye' puts the finishing touches to a sand structure representing a city of ‘Bland Castles’ at Morecambe Bay, commissioned by the Humanise Campaign to highlight the global epidemic ofuninspired, dull buildings. James Speakman/PA MediaAssignments
