The ominous creep of Baby Chic

How can we expect our children to grow up, asks Harry Mount, when British culture is becoming increasingly babyish — full of primary colours and little letters

It first struck me how babyish modern Britain has become when I got a flyer through my door about a new doctors’ surgery in Kentish Town, my patch of north London. I’d bicycled past it as it was being built — it’s your usual faceless ziggurat of undecorated, angular white concrete, with spindly, metal-framed windows half-blocked by lime-green steel grilles. No worse than the usual publicly funded horrors dumped on London’s pretty terraced streets; no better.

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And then I read the flyer — the design was apparently based on a children’s game, consisting of putting L-shapes within each other, the flyer’s author said, as if this was proof of its beauty and excellence.