Castle England: Be Careful What You Wish For

It began, as all true calamities do, with a slogan.

"An Englishman's home is his castle." Six words. No footnotes. No nuance. Just a brass trumpet blast of conviction — and a nation that had run out of patience with planning permission.

Castle England is a darkly comic satire set in a Britain not too far from now, where a charismatic populist called Victor Sterling sweeps to power on a single promise: tear up the planning system and let the people build. What follows is everything a town planner dreads and a satirist dreams of — lime green cladding, a mezzanine hot tub in a studio flat, a rotating glass cube on a 1930s semi with a horse inside, and the quiet, creeping disaster of a country that got exactly what it voted for.

Written by a chartered planner with forty years of experience watching institutions get dismantled by people who never read a policy paper, Castle England skewers the politics of deregulation, the mythology of British freedom, and the very particular anguish of professionals watching their life's work fed into a ceremonial shredder on live television.

Funny, furious, and uncomfortably plausible — especially now.