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.

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. Suddenly, I started seeing it all over the place: Baby Chic — babyishness masquerading as sophistication, hipness and novelty. The old Education Department is now the ‘department for children, schools and families’ — and all this is officially in baby-friendly lower case (what’s the point of learning what the big letters are, if you’ve already gone to the trouble of learning the little letters, and anyway aren’t little letters just so sweet unlike those horrible, big, grown-up ones?).

It’s all lower case on the metal plate outside the department’s Whitehall HQ, too, with a children’s painting of a rainbow alongside as its new symbol. And it’s the same treatment for the buildings the government puts up. In the SureStart (why not run words together? Keeping them separate is just so prescriptive and grown-up) centre in Poplar, near my work in Canary Wharf, they’ve had the bright idea of getting the children to decorate the façade.