The Broken Britain billboard returns, but this time offering hope for the future

The billboard will be located in Whitechapel and asks a hard question: not who broke Britain, but how might we start fixing it?

Elliott Starr, founder and Creative Partner at Belief Studio, has collaborated on a sequel to his Broken Britain billboard, with a new 48-sheet public artwork appearing in Whitechapel, London, during the London Design Festival.

Starr worked with David Johnston, CEO and Executive Creative Director of design studio Accept & Proceed and Indy Johar, co-founder of Dark Matter Labs, to create the Unbreak Britain Billboard. Covering the history that people in the UK are often reluctant to discuss openly: empire, extraction, exclusion, and the compounding failures of policy, this new billboard offers hope by suggesting a better version of Britain’s future.

The new work is a follow up to Starr’s Broken Britain Billboard, which began life as an anonymous public statement in Liverpool in September 2025. The original billboard asked questions around who is to blame for the state of the nation in a cost of living crisis and a visible rise in far-right sentiment – not immigrants, but years of political mismanagement and deliberate misdirection – sparking debate across social media.

Starr said: “I won’t claim to be an expert in politics. But I know people, and I know the mood of the nation. Last year it was, and still is, in a bad place. Life is hard for a lot of people. When life is hard, and those we trust to lead us point fingers, a lot of people listen, even when the facts don’t align. 

I wanted the Broken Britain Billboard to be a reality check, and it was. With this latest instalment, we want to offer a little more hope, and inspiration – a vision of a brighter future for us all. One that is within our reach, if we’re willing to change.”

The ‘Unbreak Britain Billboard’ retains the original visual red typewriter text, but adds to it in a different, blue typeface. This represents a dialogue, but also, leads to transforming what was a St. George’s Cross into a Union Jack. While the Broken Britain Billboard made a diagnosis about life in the UK, the sequel, seeks to offer an answer, exploring with hope, where the country might go, now:

“Britain doesn’t have to be a museum of itself. It can be a promise. A place, a people, strong enough to face its history without flinching.”

“The next Britain has to be built in schools, cafes, and kitchens.”

“Pride in Britain doesn’t mean pride in everything done in its name. It means asking: what are we becoming? Being brave enough to suggest something better. Not with words, but with work we do, together.”

Johnston said: “The Union flag may be Britain’s most powerful brand asset, but its meaning is increasingly being pulled towards division and exclusion. Unbreak Britain is an attempt to pull it back, to reclaim the flag as a symbol of something we share, and a country we all have a hand in repairing. It’s not simply about what the flag means, but what it might make possible.”

Johar added: “This piece seeks us to invite an embrace of the reality that everyone has journeyed to this Isle and taken multiple routes to be here—a human journey whose deepest origins lie in East Africa. Along the way, we have made and belonged to many homes and places from Germany to Australia. We arrive in the present carrying those histories and harms and those multiple forms of belonging. But being here also asks something of us to acknowledge those harms and hurts and it asks us to recognise our shared responsibility for creating a greater and better Britain—not only for ourselves, but for the citizens of the future who will inherit this beautiful land and honor the citizens of the past who experienced the hurts.

That shared responsibility is a covenant with those future citizens and past citizens. It is an invitation extended to everyone: to recognise that, however different our journeys have been, each of us has travelled to arrive here. And now that we are here, this is the place whose future we must create, safeguard and honour together.”

Source: Belief Studio

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