Covering South Yorkshire's buildings with vast artworks would turn them into a tourist attraction - Bird Lovegod

I believe this idea to be so powerful it could, if implemented, transform Rotherham into a national tourist destination. It’s that good.

Here’s how. Paint the buildings to make them beautiful, impactful, extraordinary, and wonderful.

Paint them. I’m not talking about a coating of magnolia. I’m talking about vast murals, proper artworks, eye opening extravagance of amazingness.

I’m not talking about graffiti, or anything resembling graffiti, I’m talking about proper beautiful art.

This one simple idea, implemented, would utterly transform any area, visually, then culturally, as people came to see it, walk it, explore it, and eat and drink and live in it. Artists regenerate urban areas. It already happens, has happened, it’s notorious for happening in London, first come the artists, then it becomes cool, then it becomes gentrified, then it becomes too expensive. That’s the London way, it’s what happened to Shoreditch, Hackney, and so forth.

I’m not suggesting that Rotherham, or Sheffield for that matter, would end up the same way, but without a doubt it would transform the local areas. Imagine the buildings painted as beautiful imaginary scenes. Just google ‘amazing street art’ or ‘amazing painted buildings’ and you’ll get the idea.

Huge portraits, vast optical illusions, there’s no limit to how incredible the outcomes would be. What’s preventing this? I have a few ideas.

Firstly, the councils lack imagination, creativity, and tend towards complexity and ‘urban planning ideologies’ of whatever is current at the time.

Second, it’s too affordable, tens of thousands per building, maybe £100k for a really big one; it’s almost too cheap for them to take seriously. Any idea as radical as this would not be taken seriously, a whole load of nay sayers would immediately shut it down before it got as far as serious consideration. They have plans which get worked on for a decade and never progress, they move slower than reality, and they don’t make things beautiful almost as a policy. They don’t consider beauty to be an asset, clearly, otherwise they would make beautiful things.

Spending a million on making a wide area of the city look amazing and beautiful would seem too simplistic for many of them. And they would say ‘oh it’s graffiti’, which it isn’t and ‘oh it would increase graffiti’ which it wouldn’t and in fact it could cover up a load of graffiti actually. So why don’t they do it? At very least on the buildings they own. And they could, I’m sure, encourage or require other properties to follow suit.

They could make a place like Rotherham beautiful, a wonder of the World, a place where people came to be amazed, they could transform it, simply and wonderfully, into an art town, famous and pioneering.

It would cost so little and be so amazing, it’s like they don’t do it because it would make most of them effectively redundant because of the chain reaction of regeneration it would cause. Making the towns and cities vibrant and beautiful doesn’t cost much and isn’t difficult.

What exactly is their excuse for not doing it?

Bird Lovegod is an experienced entrepreneur and Christian commentator