When I make a list of jobs to do I try to start at the bottom, doing the things I least want to do first.

If Dick 'n' Mart have the same approach then they're surely getting near to the exciting part of their vast list by now. I think it was Churchill who spoke of emerging into sunlit uplands and it's time for us to do the same.

It's time to be bold. Brassy, stylish and upfront, in true Brighton style. Not arrogant, but not apologetic either.

There's a block of flats on the seafront that a lot of people think is horrible. Adam Trimingham wants to knock it down. But I love Embassy Court and if you don't know it walk along the prom to the margins of Brighton and Hove and and if you've got the tiniest seed of imagination you will see how beautiful it could be.

The Brits can be, it is said, a bit ageist when it comes to architecture. New is rubbish and the old stuff isn't. For the most part that is true. But it doesn't have to be. Prowl around town and you'll see plenty of buildings that were awful when they were first built and are still awful now. The stained glass (as in glass that got stained, not the church variety) slab occupied by the council and a hotel in Bartholomew Square is as good an example as any.

Like the gimcrack retail sheds that bespoil the western approaches to our city, it was given its life by the same sort of people who are now crawling over my flat wanting to put flamefighter panels on the Regency front door. The same sort of people wanted to flatten Brunswick Square in the Twenties.

It's a topsy turvy world but it has a theme. The theme is mediocrity. The advantage of being mediocre is that it's safe. No one really notices average buildings until a whole street - or indeed a whole campus - of them have appeared and by then it's too late, our glorious city has become slightly more like Slough and the grey accountants and property men and bureaucrats who were responsible are long gone.

Can you imagine what would happen if someone stepped into this beige-coloured world with a planning application to construct a huge house topped with roofs like Mr Whippy ice-cream cornets? Right in the middle of town? I'll tell you. The newly-formed Keep the Steine Green Society would go berserk and councillors would tremble.

The trouble is, we're no longer very good at wonderful gestures. It's been a century and a half since someone had the nifty idea of putting a huge pavlova cake on the seafront and calling it the Grand Hotel. There have been a thousand boring buildings erected since then and while I'd like to tell you what they are I fear they've slipped my memory.

But at last the worm has turned. Some time around now a planning application will be finding its way into the council offices for a building more wondrous than any other that has happened in most of our lifetimes.

The stadium will be beautiful. You don't have to be a Catholic to marvel at Arundel Cathedral and this one won't be just for football people.

It will be a building for the city and I just hope that we're not going to come over all British about it, saying that we can't do something because we haven't done it before. It's so easy to assume it won't happen. Now is the time to be astonished at what we can do.

Anna Swallow