In 1956 Anthony Crosland, a Labour Party thinker, called for “a brighter, more colourful country”. It was not enough, he wrote, for a Labour government merely to increase exports or old-age pensions. Britain must have “more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night…more riverside cafés…more murals and pictures in public places…statues in the centre of new housing-estates, better-designed street-lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum”.