I’ve developed a bit of an allergy to fake old stuff. Not old-style furniture or someone putting a proper fireplace back into a Victorian house. That’s fine. I mean the strange sort of manufactured “heritage” that gets wheeled out whenever a developer decides a new scheme needs to look as though it has always been there. Suddenly everything is brown, the lamp posts acquire curly bits of metal, the signs use some vaguely nineteenth-century-looking typeface and there will almost certainly be a clock somewhere. Why are there always clocks? Apparently nothing says “historic British town” like a massive decorative clock attached to a shopping development built eighteen months ago.
The funny thing is that genuinely historic streets don’t look anything like these fake heritage developments. Real places are messy. A Georgian terrace might have Victorian shopfronts underneath it, a twentieth-century extension round the back and a satellite dish stuck somewhere it probably shouldn’t be. A medieval street may contain buildings from five different centuries. That mixture is what makes it feel genuine. Trying to reproduce the effect by making everything look vaguely Victorian normally creates the opposite result. It feels like a film set. All the ingredients are technically present, but you can somehow sense that the place hasn’t lived through anything.
I’d much rather see a decent modern building beside an old one than a bad imitation pretending to be old. At least the modern building is being honest about when it was built. Some of the best historic places contain brilliant contrasts. Old stone beside glass can look fantastic. Brick beside steel can work. A simple contemporary extension can make the original building stand out more clearly because you can see where one period ends and another begins. We seem oddly frightened of this in Britain. We celebrate Victorian engineers for being adventurous and using the newest technology available to them, then insist that our own generation should disguise everything as something from 150 years ago.
Paving is one of the places where fake heritage can become particularly obvious. Real old granite setts have variation. They’re different colours, some are more worn than others and the surface has normally been repaired in places over the years. Then you see a modern attempt at recreating the look and everything is too perfect. Every block is exactly the same size, every colour is identical and the joints are so regular that it looks more like a kitchen floor than an historic street. The more aggressively something tries to look old, the newer it can end up looking.
That doesn’t mean modern alternatives are bad. This is where people tend to jump into camps, and I don’t think that helps. Something can be modern, manufactured and still be entirely appropriate in a heritage setting. It just depends what you expect it to do. If you need to create a traffic-calming feature on a road through an old town, you might not need individually laid natural stone to achieve the right overall effect. Most drivers will see the colour, pattern and change in surface rather than stopping to inspect the geology. If a modern system gives you that visual distinction and can be put down much more quickly, there’s a perfectly sensible argument for using it.
Where I think we go wrong is pretending that everything is equivalent. Genuine natural stone has qualities imitation products can’t completely reproduce. It has depth, slight inconsistencies and the ability to age in ways that often make it look better rather than simply more worn. There is nothing wrong with admitting that. Equally, traditional stone can be expensive, slow to install and disruptive. There is nothing wrong with admitting that either. The sensible decision is about context, not pretending one side has won some grand philosophical argument about authenticity.
This becomes obvious when you think about where people actually experience the surface. A pedestrian square outside a historic building is somewhere you walk slowly, sit around and probably look at quite closely. There, the genuine material is doing a lot of visual work and might be worth every penny. A raised table carrying vehicles across a junction is different. You might still want something sympathetic, but there’s less reason to insist that every piece of it must be historically authentic. That seems like basic common sense, but heritage arguments have a habit of becoming strangely moral. Use the reproduction material and apparently you’re destroying history. Use the expensive traditional option and somebody else thinks you’re wasting public money.
There is another part of fake heritage that bothers me, which is the assumption that old automatically means tasteful. It doesn’t. There were plenty of ugly things built 150 years ago. There are terrible old buildings, ridiculous decoration and badly designed streets. We shouldn’t copy something merely because it looks traditional. A simple modern bench can sit beautifully in an old square because it doesn’t compete with the architecture, while a fake Victorian bench covered in ornate cast-metal swirls can look utterly ridiculous. Heritage aesthetics should be about understanding the character of a place, not selecting everything from the “traditional” section of a catalogue.
The same applies to street signs, lighting, railings and paving. Sometimes less is better. Historic buildings already contain an enormous amount of visual detail. You don’t need to add another layer of pretend historical decoration on top. In fact, one of the best things councils could do in some old town centres would be to remove half the clutter. Fewer signs, fewer bollards, fewer giant planters and fewer bits of unnecessary street furniture would probably reveal more actual heritage than adding another heritage-themed object ever could.
I also think we need to accept that today’s good modern design will eventually become tomorrow’s heritage. People forget that all heritage was new once. Railway stations were modern. Cast-iron bridges were modern. Plate glass was modern. Concrete was modern. Someone probably stood nearby complaining that each new technology lacked the charm of whatever it was replacing. Now we protect many of those same structures because they tell us something about their period. If all we do in 2026 is copy the appearance of earlier centuries, what exactly are we leaving behind that says anything about us?
So I’m not interested in making every old town look as though time stopped before the First World War. I’d rather see genuine old things protected properly and genuinely new things designed with enough intelligence to sit alongside them. Use real stone where its texture and longevity matter. Use a modern alternative where speed, cost or disruption makes that more sensible. Keep the colours and proportions sympathetic. Don’t install something hideous just because it is cheap, but equally don’t demand historically perfect construction where nobody will ever notice the difference.
The best heritage work shouldn’t scream heritage. It should simply look right. You ought to walk through the finished place without thinking, “Ah yes, they’ve gone for the traditional option here.” You should just feel that nothing is fighting with anything else. Old stays old, new is allowed to be new, and the two somehow make sense together. That seems much more respectful to history than building something brand new and trying desperately to convince everybody it arrived in 1887.
The question of “real thing versus convincing modern alternative” is especially clear when you look at paving, where cost and construction disruption can be just as important as appearance. This piece comparing Quicksetts with traditional granite setts is a good follow-up because it deals with those trade-offs rather than pretending heritage design is simply about picking whatever looks oldest: https://www.iamcivilengineer.com/quicksetts-vs-traditional-granite-setts/
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