Oh no, not more good taste. Beige is back, and even the new Ford Mondeo is wowing the critics. So is naff dead?

The January sales were once the peak of the consumer year. Now, bar the odd zealot who still camps out all night to be first into Harrods, they register barely a blip in retail park Britain, which has become a year-round consumer spree slipping seamlessly from one season to the next.

The January sales were once the peak of the consumer year. Now, bar the odd zealot who still camps out all night to be first into Harrods, they register barely a blip in retail park Britain, which has become a year-round consumer spree slipping seamlessly from one season to the next.

This is good news, we are told, for the bullishness of our shopping arcades is the way that we now judge prosperity, quality of life - our very happiness, even. But even as more of us buy more things, somewhere along the line we have lost the talent to express ourselves and to define ourselves by our differences. For British taste has flattened out across all kinds of social divisions, and there is a far greater commonality of public taste. This aesthetic consensus may be comfortable, but it does sometimes look as if British taste is melding into one great minimal beige morass.

The recent television documentary on Posh and Becks - renowned previously as the King and Queen of nouveau riche vulgarity - revealed a home that was in reality rather muted and tasteful, with none of the ornate gimcrackery that one might expect. The new Ford Mondeo, once the vote-swinging rep's motor of choice, has joined the people carriers and hatchbacks as a vehicle quite acceptable to the middle classes - indeed, it is regarded by many a motoring critic as an aesthetic triumph. Branded sportswear has a hegemonic hold on the nation, particularly the young. It is difficult to tell tribal affiliation when all are dressed in Gap.

Even our pubs have become temples of neutral good taste. The British drinking den was once a snug parlour where naff ruled: all kitsch ornamentation, horse brasses, hunting prints and burnt-wood proverbs behind the bar. Now, led by the All Bar One pub chain, which has "branded" the boozer and turned it into a mid-market cross between a coffee bar and a loft, the pub is becoming a showhome kitchen, without any of the imagery that once made the pub a temple of the tacky.

Surveys indicate that the rump of British people believe they are "middle class" - a notion now mostly indicated by shared taste, rather than profession or provenance. Blond beech wood floors, Habitat sofas, Ikea chests of drawers - these things can belong to anyone, with no emotive reading of social circumstance. They are entirely neutral signifiers of class.

This is a top-down phenomenon, says the social commentator and style guru Peter York: "The colourless blond wood, steel and leather look that rules on the high street is directed by large corporations which often use the same designers," he says. "We may talk of empowering citizens but the reality is that the takeup of the taste that I call 'mainstream soft modernism' is about the triumph of central planning."

This levelling of the local taste vernacular has been helped by successive chainstores. In the 1960s Habitat established a model of good taste - personifed by the metropolitan neo-paysan with her Le Creuset marmites and Japanese paper lanterns - but did not penetrate much further than the urban middle classes. The crucial moment in the development of today's bland good taste probably came with the Next stores in the early 1980s. They ushered in a mainstream corporate aesthetic, flavourless enough to be acceptable to almost anyone and enabling the barriers between the hieratic and demotic to be at least partly demolished. "Now few people say, 'that isn't for the likes of us'," says Peter York.

Now it is Ikea that sums up the new British taste consensus. The Swedish chainstore has opened up the UK to a certain standard of modernist taste - and look how we flock round the ring-roads to buy into its flat-pack dream. The many "shelter" magazines play their part in encouraging a certain notion of good taste with their visions of domestic loveliness, and we can collectively wince at the depredations of the old world, with its stick-on beams, bad-trip carpets and artex squorls.

The word favoured by the magazine fraternity is "aspirational" - that, with luck and money, we may all "get the look". Now the world inside The World of Interiors is all the more attainable.

The same has happened in food and wine. Mostly gone are the days when one type of person drank Blue Nun and another Burgundy. These days a bottle of Jacob's Creek will suit all but the most demanding oenophile. And it is possible to get a Gaggia-steamed coffee virtually anywhere: probably even in Newcastle, where I once enjoyed a "cappuccino" made of Maxwell House topped with a swoosh of aerosol creamer. Precious few of us use the dread phrase "real coffee" any longer.

Food, too: in greasy wayside inns up and down the country the mechanically recovered offerings are as dismal as ever. But many now also serve salad, pizza and pasta. It is a new gastronomic mood that can be summed up in one word - ciabatta. The flat olive oil bread has become symbolic, the very fuel of beige new Britain. In matters of taste, the population is presently empowered to an unprecedented degree.

But how did we get to this point? Prior to the industrial revolution, only the haute bourgeoisie could afford to have any "taste", indeed, only they had the education, buying power and mobility to be able to exercise any choice at all.

It was during the Victorian retail boom that consumption opened up to more than just the rich, and it was then that our divisions of taste became enshrined and stratified according to class. Attempts to define common standards of taste became a socialist goal but actual taste became mired in class tribalism. Only now, oddly, has the modernist agenda of good design for all become enthusiastically taken up by a critical mass of the public, all of whom would like Arne Jacobson chairs in their kitchens. Yet there are dangers in assumptions of common taste, particularly when imposed from above. The strictures put upon home-owners by councils in heritage zones such as Windsor, Edinburgh and Bath, for instance - where they insist that doors on Georgian properties be painted white only - seems an affront to our cherished individualism.

Worse, some developers insist on instructing the guileless inhabitants of their housing stock in matters of taste. Sapcote, a loft developer in London, has issued regulations that say nothing should be on patios bar pot plants in stone, wood or clay, nor should washing or dustbins be seen and, in a weird echo of the dictatorial modernist architect Mies van der Rohe who refused to authorise different coloured curtains in his flats, Sapcote requests that tenants eschew net curtains and Austrian blinds. Another developer, Beechcroft Homes, bans garden furniture and flower tubs made of plastic, while Countryside Residential has covenants for new residents that include the right of veto over garden sheds.

The public expression of taste is a moot point. Adrian Dobinson of the conservation agency Renaissance, which runs courses on the upkeep of historic homes, believes that a democratic consensus should prevail when it comes to individual displays of taste in the community. "Whenever it arises, Parliament always reiterates that the state must not meddle in matters of personal taste," he says. "But of course, some taste control is in the collective interest."

Public taste is based on the democratic principle of mutual tolerance: a fact that Norwich City Council took on board by offering a range of colours to centrally located residents, down to a choice of colours for their curtains. At least in this way, inhabitants were able to have some say in the appearance of their homes.

Nevertheless, most find something deeply uncomfortable about taste diktats, not least because they run counter to our drive to put ourselves apart from the ovine flock. Then there is the fact that consensus taste is very often bland, fixed with petit-bourgeois conformity. In 1933 John Betjeman argued in his Ghastly Good Taste that it was such "refeenment" and "good taste" that killed English architecture.

Artists, many of whom operate (or hope to operate) on the outer boundaries of taste - and may even occasionally set the agenda - have long recognised the neutralising power of so-called "good taste". "It is good taste alone that possesses the power to sterilise," said Salvador Dali. Picasso felt that "good taste was the enemy of creativity", and the media theorist Marshall McLuhan called good taste "the first refuge of the non-creative". It is up to us to define our differences, and bad taste might even push things forward.

Indeed, one might even be illuminated by "bad" taste. Alison Roberts of the fashion design company Antoni and Alison, is inspired by brightly coloured pop imagery of the sort that would be considered tasteless. "I think it can help design move on," she says. "It forces you to look a bit harder to find beauty." Peter York, meanwhile, yearns for the return of the baroque, the colourful, the exotic. "There's only so much mainstream soft modernism you can take," he says. "It's terribly bland."

And even though we have reached this beige standard of taste, it can still turn like the weather. Georgina Stead of the internet interior design shop Eatmyhandbagbitch has seen some incredibly quick taste-turnarounds. "We'd have 1960s Delphis crockery by Poole in the shop and people would say 'ugh, that's disgusting'," she says. "Then Poole revamped the brand and fashionable shops began stocking it, and now they love it."

In taste, as in life, risk is often rewarded.