Local resident, Tom Bage explores the journey to pre-permit mansard extensions in East London and what he has learnt from it. Back in March 2023, the brilliant team at Create Streets asked me to write about an ongoing campaign in Bow, East London, to allow mansard loft extensions on the area’s many Victorian terraces. The […]
At Create Streets, we think a lot about how to make places better—more beautiful, more walkable, more enduring. But what if we also designed places to get stronger through stress? That’s the idea at the heart of antifragility, a concept coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Where resilience resists shocks, antifragility thrives on them. It’s about […]
Nicholas Boys Smith visits the new British Memorial in Normandy I was nervous of visiting the new British Normandy Memorial at Ver-sur-Mer. I was unconvinced by the need for it. Surely, there is one already, the British cemetery and memorial at Bayeux, where 4,648 young men lie forever and where over 1,800 more, whose bodies […]
By Robert Kwolek Germany may be the land of Autobahns and Audis, but its true urban workhorse is the Straßenbahn, or ‘street train’. While Britain and North America tore up their trams after World War II, Germany kept, and modernised, theirs. Today, an unrivalled 60 cities still run trams, stitching together new housing, walkable neighbourhoods […]
Inspired by a visit to Exhibition Road, Nicholas Boys Smith and Eleanor Broad ask what lessons the transformation of Exhibition Road has for Oxford Street’s pedestrianisation A generation ago, Exhibition Road was a place to avoid, a street that should have been splendid but somehow wasn’t. Broad and generous, and running between the high Victorian […]
Empty homes are back in the news. The Prime Minister said we can use them to house immigrants. Is he right? Do we have an empty homes problem in the UK? If so, what should we do about it? Can we better use empty homes to house those on the waiting list or immigrants or […]
Nicholas Boys Smith suggests a little more humility in how we design and manage our streets and buildings if we want to enjoy hot summer days in the city Nearly everything we’ve done to our towns and cities for the last century has heated them up. That might be good in the winter. But it’s […]
Nicholas Boys Smith in conversation with Create Streets fellow and Benghazi resident, Nada Elfeituri, and Create Streets senior urban designer, George Payiatis, about Create Streets’s support to the regenerative repair of Benghazi’s city centre Introduction: a city with a rich history but recent challenges Nicholas Boys Smith: Nada, George, it’s lovely to see you both […]
How we create new places and steward old ones to be beautiful and durable, happy and healthy On Thursday, 5 June 2025, a carefully selected, invitation only group of landowners, council leaders, investors, architects and advisors gathered at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, in one of England’s most lovely places. We were the guests of Lord […]
Nicholas Boys Smith reflets on two days in Doha. “We are wise because we are not so highly educated as to look down upon our laws and customs.” King of Sparta as cited in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War. Last week I visited Qatar. I had been invited to chair a discussion on how […]