here always was an artistic case for London to have a 21st-century concert hall. Both the Royal Festival Hall (built in the late 1940s) and the Barbican Hall (1960s-70s) have fundamental problems in matching the best halls in the world. London is – or was – one of the world’s cultural capitals. It could undoubtedly have made rich use of a better venue – a venue that was in the works until ambitious plans for the £288m Centre for Music were scrapped on Thursday. In a perfect world – in which money was no object, the arts were more celebrated and politicians felt under pressure to treat cultural value seriously – the Centre for Music would have been a marked improvement. Simon Rattle’s 2017 appointment as head of the London Symphony Orchestra, based in the Barbican, gave the project a star power it otherwise lacked. The political case against the hall predated both of these. Justifying the cost, the priority, the location and the uses to which the hall would be put were all delicate tasks in any case. It was hard not to see it as an elite project, only distantly connected with wider public need at a time when funding was being squeezed. This was especially true because the project would be based in and financed by the City of London, the richest square-mile in Europe, a much-resented part of an increasingly unequal Britain and one where relatively few people live or go out in the evening. In an era in which the public realm has declined, the public sector has been bled by austerity, and the inequalities between rich London and the neglected regions has deepened, it was a tough and questionable sell from the start. Then came Brexit. Liberal elites were pushed even further on to the back foot. And despite the artistic case, it was hard not to see the hall as anything other than a liberal elite project. Theresa May’s government was quick to withdraw the £5m grant that the Cameron government had allocated to a business plan. When the Brexit deal was completed last year, London’s orchestras were left high and dry, along with thousands of other arts organisations. Worst of all for those who yearned for a new hall, Rattle himself pulled out, preferring to relocate to Germany, where they take music seriously and where Brexit is seen as the catastrophically foolish decision Rattle believes it to be. Covid made things even more difficult. Halls of any kind were virus spreaders. Existing halls shut down. Orchestras struggled to find ways of functioning online, ran up huge debts, survived on faith, hope and charity, and sometimes not at all. The medium-term future of all concert halls is still a land without maps. Now the Centre for Music is dead. It will join London’s long list of cultural might-have-beens, alongside the opera house that was almost constructed in Parliament Square opposite Big Ben. It was a nice idea in some ways, but the case for it was never strong, never a priority. Britain has often been hopeless at such projects, especially where the arts are concerned. The world and Britain have moved on, not necessarily for the better, but in a glumly familiar way. That the new centre will not have many mourners says much about Britain, and a lot about the original idea itself.