BY RICHARD DUWELL-TRUMBELL

Over the past two years, something unexpected has happened in Britain. Across architecture, politics, culture, religion, and even the digital sphere, a new seriousness has emerged — a revival of tradition, form, hierarchy, Christian identity, and civilisational ambition.

This essay attempts to map the moment. Not nostalgically, but as the first field report of a real intellectual shift.

There are moments in a nation’s life when the atmosphere shifts before anyone has found the language for it. Britain in 2025 lived through such a moment. For six decades the country behaved like a great house ashamed of its own drawing room—apologising for its architecture, doubting its institutions, treating its past like an eccentric relative to be hidden whenever guests arrived. And then, almost without warning, the pressure changed. Something older, firmer, more dignified stirred beneath the surface.

It began—as these things usually do—not in Westminster but in images. A rising tide of spires, quoins, sash windows, Georgian terraces, and railway halls built like cathedrals spread across the digital commons. For years this material belonged to “Trad Twitter”—a charming, slightly whimsical online realm of tweed memes and wistful nostalgia. But in 2024–25 it became something else. The memes hardened into models. The sketches into plans. The longing into appetite. A generation that had grown up under Blairite postmodernism found itself speaking of beauty, inheritance, hierarchy, and continuity with a seriousness that would have been unthinkable even five years earlier.

No example better captures the shift than the remarkable ascent of Joe Reeve’s Forest City proposal (main picture). At first glance it is a city planned in traditional classical form. At second glance it is something closer to cultural seismography: tens of thousands of Britons, who would never normally pick up Country Life, found themselves lingering over colonnades and porticos not with irony but with longing.

The surface detail matters less than what the reaction revealed. Forest City is not a Poundbury redux. It is an Anglofuturist gesture—an attempt by a technologically fluent young entrepreneur to braid civilisational inheritance with modern ambition. That such a mood is suddenly thinkable, even desirable, to ordinary Britons is the real story.

For the first time in two generations, traditional architecture ceased to feel like a nostalgic indulgence. It became a diagnostic instrument. It revealed the wound—the abandonment of beauty in the built world—and the desire for healing. More importantly, it made visible something deeper: a cultural hunger for form.

Something else moved in late winter 2024. One could feel it on X before one could define it: a new seriousness entering the cultural bloodstream of a nation that had spent twenty years confusing irony for thought.

It was not Westminster that shifted. It was Young Britain—builders, coders, parish conservatives, dissident graduates, and post-liberal Tories—asking what a future worth living in might look like. The Anglofuturism Podcast did not merely popularise a term; it broke the rhetorical embargo on thinking big.

Early episodes were playful—Mars, Doggerland, Elon Musk’s hypothetical heirs. But by 2025 the tone matured.

• First, in February, came “Britain’s Antarctic Manifest Destiny,” the first time since the Falklands War that young Britons spoke openly about British settlement in Antarctica.
• The “shadow empire” episode made explicit what had been implicit: that Britain’s empire, her influence, law, and capital were not dead, merely dormant.

This did not spring from nowhere. In an episode of the Anglofuturism Podcast in November 2024, geostrategist Samo Burja argued on-air that the British Antarctic Territory remained the least understood strategic asset on the planet. A year earlier such talk would have been dismissed as crankish. Today it slips naturally into the national conversation, including in the Telegraph where Tom Ough, co-host of the podcast, wrote about Antarctic Anglofuturism in March 2025, marking its first mainstream media appearance and the resurgence of British neo-imperialism in its pages for the first time since the Falklands War over four decades earlier.

British neo-imperial imagination is no longer taboo. It is a live option.

This matters because it signals a movement away from nostalgia. The new instinct is creative, not antiquarian. Young Britons are not reenacting the Victorians; they are reclaiming the unspent legacy of the common law, the Overseas Territories, the unused islands of the Atlantic and Antarctic, the possibility of British settlement—on earth before in orbit.

The cultural question almost asks itself: Why did this shift happen now?

Something deeper than post-liberal critique is underway.

The technocratic settlement of the Blair–Cameron era quietly expired around 2022, though the public only realized it later. The old assurances—that perpetual modernisation would deliver prosperity, that managerial cleverness could reverse cultural decay—simply lost their power.

• Brexit cracked the façade.
• Lockdowns shattered public trust.
• Inflation exposed institutional fragility.
• And the widening gulf between a deracinated managerial caste and the country itself snapped the last ligatures of consensus.

The “centre” did not collapse. It evaporated. There was nothing left to hold.

Into that void surged an unembarrassed longing for the solid, the inherited, the embodied: institutions with roots; authority with memory; craft with continuity; hierarchy with obligation; tradition that does not apologise for itself.

It is in this climate that Reform UK emerged—not flawless, not philosophically uniform, but unmistakeably the first patriotic party in decades to stir public feeling rather than merely manage discontent. Reform’s rise is not reducible to anti-migration sentiment; it is the political manifestation of a much older reawakening:

• a rediscovery of Englishness as a cultural fact rather than an embarrassment;
• a quiet Christian revival;
• a renewed appetite for classical aesthetics in dress, speech, and public architecture.

Columnists like Dr Bijan Omrani in The Critic magazine now urge Englishmen to reclaim the “art of dressing well” as an act of national self-respect—something that would have seemed eccentric in 2019 but reads as timely now.

As the often discerning online magazine J’accuse recently pointed out, the Anglosphere has become a single conversation space. Through X, a Texan, a Londoner, and a Nova Scotian now inhabit the same intellectual field.

American trends—TradCath imagery, classical revivalism, DeSantis-era state assertiveness, Trump’s unfinished Neo-Palladian aesthetic—crossed the Atlantic instantly.

Britain did not copy them; Britain was reminded: you built these things first.

Back home, small circles like the New Culture Forum, the revived Primrose League, the Traditional Britain Group, and a cohort of young post-liberals began speaking without embarrassment about authority, beauty, empire, aristocracy, and national character. What had been taboo became discussable. What had been discussable became desirable.

By 2025 the idea of reviving British settlement, British dominion, British greatness—was no longer eccentric LARP. It was one strand of a broader cultural reawakening. The taboo cracked. Hierarchy re-legitimised itself. Form returned.

A year ago, no respectable British commentator — certainly not one employed at a national paper — would have spoken calmly about the strategic value of Britain’s remaining imperial archipelago. Not without irony, embarrassment, or the ritual invocation of decline.

Yet in autumn 2025, Tom Ough and Calum Drysdale sat on the Anglofuturism Podcast and asked, without flinching, how Britain might use her overseas territories imaginatively in the twenty-first century.

This was a watershed. It revealed that the old “imperial cringe” has finally broken. In its place stands a new, post-managerial posture: Britain can once again think of itself as a global civilisational actor — a great power, an empire extant, a polity with reach and consequence across the seven seas.

The Ough–Drysdale exchange, informed by James Kingston’s work, made the case plainly:

• Jersey alone intermediates £1.4 trillion in capital — feeding British banks.
• Cayman dominates hedge-fund domiciling, employing British lawyers on Chinese deals.
• The Isle of Man is building data-trust legislation ahead of Westminster.
• The CDOTs (Crown Dependencies & Overseas Territories) are not “tax havens” but innovation jurisdictions.

Most strikingly, Kingston insisted that ceding territories — as Labour has signalled with its Chagos negotiations — is not realism but neurosis. Presence is power. Withdrawal is death.

This new tone matters. It is the first mainstream sign that the Anglosphere’s post-liberal right has moved from critique to construction. The British shadow empire — once an embarrassment — is being re-theorised as an asset: a platform for technology, law, energy, and even space launch capacity.

This is the quiet truth of Britain’s current mood: the people have begun to feel, instinctively, that their ruling class is not merely incompetent but disinherited. They feel — often without articulating it — that the restoration of continuity will require the restoration of some form of inheritance. Of land, of honour, of duty.

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First published in The Christian Statesman here. Finnish by birth, British by soul, Richard Duwell-Trumbell is focused on Christendom restored: monarchy, aristocracy, Anglofuturist statecraft, Biblical æsthetics, seasteading, and Christian territorial dominion.