Can a car be beautiful? Of course it can. Any object can be beautifully designed and crafted. And there are certainly many beautiful cars.

The beautiful fantasy.

By itself in a studio, or surrounded by greenery, a car can present an inspiring image. Sleek and shiny, or rounded and cheeky. Some seem to have characters of their own.

But, as Oscar Wilde said,

“No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.”

And the unfortunate thing about cars is that those ‘certain conditions’ are their normal surroundings, with other cars and out on a normal road.

As soon as you get a few cars together with their discordant colours, shapes and sizes they become an unsightly metalic mass. Have you ever seen a beautiful car park? I don’t mean the building, I mean the cars. It would take a very peculiar sense of aesthetics for your local NCP to send you into raptures.

And then there are the roads. An overgrown track or unkempt country road can be a thing of beauty, as can a railway line, or, of course, a canal.

But most modern roads are unrelenting tarmac, with added clutter. There is something deeply unattractive about tarmac. Perhaps it’s its brutal, life-denying quality. Or it’s inorganic, chemical composition. Road-kill belongs on tarmac.

Most roads are an insult to our visual sensibility. We want to look away from them rather than admire them. But drivers beware if you do look away for a moment, tempted by the beauty of the fields or sky, you risk death and trauma. A truly devilish conundrum.

Roads dominate the public space where we spend our daily lives. Whilst the creative types have been busy with other, sexier things, we have somehow allowed the Genesis fans with no dress sense to design our highways. The result is that our kingdom is ugly. Very ugly. And to add financial injury to visual insult, we spend a king’s ransom on keeping our streets this way:

The ugly reality.