If George Osborne has an identifying attribute – what a cigar was to Churchill or a pint of beer to Zac Goldsmith – it is the pairing of hard hat and hi-vis jacket. One suspects he would struggle to wield a screwdriver to much effect but he loves to have himself photographed, again and again, on construction sites and industrial premises, dressed like a man who knows how to make things.

The message is clear enough. Here is someone to get Britain building. Britain has an economy where construction has a particular status and where a favoured way to nudge the economy forward is to get more concrete mixers whirring and bricks laid. “Industry” can be almost synonymous with “construction industry”, due to the shrinkage of other types. The country also needs more homes. What then could be more appropriate than for the chancellor to remind people of his role in stimulating such things?

What is the sum of the parts, what future country is being constructed, what vision underlies it all?

He has a corresponding interest in putting his stamp on policies and projects that involve building, even when they are the concern of other ministries than the Treasury. He likes to promote housebuilders and then demonstrate that his plans are working. He declares a garden city in Ebbsfleet, Kent. He backs nuclear power stations and high-speed rail and promises to get them paid for with Chinese investment. Most surprisingly, from time to time he loosens the belt of the budgetary disciplinarian to reveal a closet minstrel, a profligate lover of the arts and of follies: development funding for a £278m concert hall that promises the outstanding acoustics currently lacking in large London venues, £30m to a garden bridge, lavish support to a large but vague arts complex in Manchester. He throws money at institutions of futuristic science.

This Conservative politician begins to look like the French socialist builder of grands projets François Mitterrand or the English socialist Tony Benn, backer of Concorde. He has something too of the Dome-building Blair. He promises to leave a legacy of brick, concrete, steel and glass matched by few of his predecessors, which would alter the landscape of Britain, both city and countryside, to palpable effect. It is therefore reasonable to ask what is the sum of the parts, what future country is being constructed, what vision or at least assumptions underlie it all.

There is certainly ambition to achieve benefits to which no one could object. If every initiative does what it is supposed to do, it would give the country better and greener transport, a secure supply of energy, an enhanced cultural life and prosperity based on advanced scientific research. The economy would be better balanced between north and south. More people would own their homes, some of them in well-planned new communities. In the case of the cultural projects, Osborne’s support arises from genuine interest. “He does like the arts,” says a formal special adviser to Osborne, Rohan Silva. “He’s a rare non-philistine in government."

At the same time, there can be a phantasmagoric quality to Osborne’s monuments. With some, there can be reasonable doubt whether they will happen at all or exist more to enable the media announcement of the chancellor’s good intention. Others may not be the best way to achieve their stated aims but also serve as symbols of public benefits, devices for achieving maximum publicity and political advantage.

As well as calculation there might also be an element of vanity, a recurrence of the not-uncommon weakness of politicians to glorify themselves with building, to build buildings that look as if they are addressing a need rather than addressing the need itself. The Great Wall of China, for example, impressive as it is to look at, was not all that good at keeping out Mongol hordes.

The £61m Osborne-backed National Graphene Institute in Manchester. Photograph: Alamy

Some of Osborne’s constructional largesse is inspired by graphene, the miraculous substance discovered by two Russian-émigré physicists at the University of Manchester, for which they won the Nobel prize. It is called the world’s first 2D material, being carbon one atom thick. It is transparent, extraordinarily light, flexible and 200 times as strong as steel. For now, many of its possible uses are in the nice-to-have rather than essential category – clothes embedded with electronics, flaccid mobile phones, low-energy and low-cost light bulbs – but it also has potential medical and other applications. It could conceivably be what steam power was to the Industrial Revolution and silicon was to the information age.

For these reasons, and for the hopes it offered for an advanced industrial renaissance in the city most associated with a previous age of manufacturing supremacy, Osborne backed a £61m National Graphene Institute in Manchester and opened it last year. It would “put the UK in pole position to lead the world in graphene technology,” he said. The building looks crystalline and futuristic in an old-fashioned sort of way. It boasts dust-free PVC blackboards, a wildflower garden on the roof terrace and the only lab in the world with clean rooms on two different floors that are connected by a lift.

A still bigger graphene-inspired organisation is being backed by the chancellor, the £235m Sir Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials Research, which will have a “hub” in Manchester and “spokes” in Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield and other cities. The idea is that it will “encompass 14 key areas of materials research including graphene”. The Royce and the NGI, said the chancellor, will “help cement the north, and Manchester in particular, as a world leader in science and innovation.”

Not all scientists were convinced that graphene merited such a splurge of investment. A “very senior British professor” told the BBC that it is a “waste of money”, that it “will never be revolutionary: the technology is too limited – it is interesting but not a game-changer”. There was also a report in the Sunday Times, albeit one firmly slapped down by the university, of a revolt among researchers. It was said they refused to work in the building on the basis that their intellectual property was going to end up in the hands of foreign companies that had been invited into the institute as partners.

Sir Andre Geim, one of the two Nobel-winning heroes of the graphene revolution, was quoted as saying that the new building was “money put in the British building industry rather than science”. Geim responded by calling the allegations “ridiculous” and “twisted” and said that his remarks had been taken out of context. “I see the relationship between the university and collaborating companies,” he said, “as a way to stimulate graphene developments for the good of UK plc.”

In his telling, the institute is an admirable plan to do what business will not do unaided, which is to take a long-term view on investing in “disruptive technologies”.

Osborne’s backing for Mancunian science is matched by his support for the city’s arts. Factory, a “world-beating arts space” designed by the celebrated architects OMA, is receiving £78m of its £110m capital cost from the Treasury, plus £9m in revenue funding from 2018 to 2020. This is a largesse for which most arts organisations would give both arms and all their dentistry. Factory is described as “large scale”, “ultra flexible” and as combining the qualities of the London Coliseum and Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. “This won’t only be unlike any other arts facility in the UK,” said Manchester city council leader, Sir Richard Leese, at a launch, “Factory will be unlike anywhere else in the world.”

‘Ultra-flexible’: a model of the proposed St John’s quarter in Manchester, displayed last year at the launch of the planned £78m Factory arts centre. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

It risks being a re-run of the box-ticking, all-things-to-all-people flops of the early years of lottery funding

It will provide a single large hall, capable of performances to audiences of up to 5,000, but also capable of being subdivided for major exhibitions and smaller events. Maria Balshaw, director of the Whitworth Art Gallery and strategic lead for culture at Manchester city council, says it will be an “immersive”, “multi art-form” space that could house “a new kind of Ring Cycle”, “large-scale gallery-type shows” such as the Victoria and Albert’s David Bowie and Alexander McQueen exhibitions, and “challenging things like Massive Attack”. Ultimately, she says, the aim is “to get things to happen in the north that couldn’t happen anywhere else”. It will expand on the success of the Manchester International festival, which currently takes place in multiple venues but will make Factory its base.

Factory could indeed be extraordinary but there are reasons to be sceptical. Great arts buildings are usually good at being one thing or another, an opera house or an art gallery, not both. For a project that was supposed to start construction this year and to which so much money has already been promised, Factory is light on specifics of artistic direction and, on published evidence, on audience research and business planning. Balshaw insists the work is being done, however “We’ve been going with our gut instinct,” she says, “but now we’re getting the business plan to prove it.” The senior BBC executive Jenny Baxter has just been announced as Factory’s project director.

At worst, Factory risks being a rerun of the box-ticking, all-things-to-all-people, let’s-spend-the-money-somehow flops of the early years of lottery funding, a Millennium Dome of the north or the Public in West Bromwich writ larger. This suspicion might be enhanced by the fact that the idea arose in part from conversations between Osborne and Manchester’s chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, and a decision to go with what Balshaw calls “a very headline idea”. But Peter Saville, until recently creative director of the city of Manchester, believes that “the success and momentum of the festival does warrant a home”. He believes Factory could be the sort of talent-attracting institution that could help “make Manchester the most important city in the UK, because London is not in the UK anymore”.

The venue’s name is a homage to Factory Records, the celebrated label of Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays and other bands whose works may or may not have reverberated round Osborne’s undergraduate rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, and in the 1980s brought rejuvenating cultural energy to a city battered by industrial decline. Factory Records was an entrepreneurial and improvisational outfit, driven by content over form or brand. Factory will be more top-down, driven by politics and publicity as well as culture. Saville, who helped create Factory Records and gave it its visual identity, is uneasy with the use of the old name for the new project. “This the festival’s building,” he says, adding that “the civic mindset doesn’t fully appreciate what Factory Records did.”

As with other Osborne projects, the property business is not far away. It is meant to be part of “a new neighbourhood for enterprise, culture and living, called St John’s Quarter, worth an estimated £1.35bn when complete, proposed by the developers Allied London on the site of the former Granada TV studios. There will be a “small tight-knit urban grain, familiar to the old street pattern”, which will nonetheless be capable of accommodating towers rising up to 60 storeys. Factory, or even the mere promise of it, is plainly a boost to the marketing of St John’s. Something similar can be expected with the London concert hall. It is promised for a site in the City currently occupied by the Museum of London and, as the project develops, no one should be surprised to see a large commercial development, perhaps with a tower, riding on the back of it.

Osborne’s tributes to art and science are, of course, part of his idea of a northern powerhouse, whereby the band of cities across Lancashire and Yorkshire are to become a nexus of commerce and culture to rival or complement London. As in the Randstad in the Netherlands or the Rhine-Ruhr region in Germany, a constellation of urban settlements is to become more than the sum of its parts, with the help of improved transport connections and restructured city governments.

The principle is beyond reproach, promising as it does both to rebalance England in favour of northern locations that still haven’t recovered from the loss of manufacturing and away from overheating London. The doubts arise in the substance. Ed Cox, of the thinktank IPPR North, has said that “it’s a concept, rather than any actual, physical thing at the moment”. Lord Kerslake, former head of the civil service, says: “There is huge potential here but there is still something of a gap between rhetoric and reality. Rebalancing is going in the opposite direction: there is a continuing shift towards the south.”

He cites the findings of the University of Sheffield’s Political Economy Research Institute that “chaos reigns” and the “agenda remains a rather hollow one”.

The northern powerhouse 'is a brand, a diversion tactic designed to placate the people and politicians of the north'

Nick Johnson, formerly of the sparky property company Urban Splash, says the northern powerhouse “is a brand, not driven by content, a diversion tactic designed to placate the people and the politicians of the north”. It also suffers from an “obsession with big-ticket projects” requiring large-scale corporate development. “We have to engage at a more granular level. We could be getting on with it right now with projects that would make a real difference. It should be about encouragement of local enterprise and its effect on attractiveness of a place.”

He gives as an example his own current work helping revive Altrincham, a town that was “in intensive care”, through transforming its market into a haven of craft and good food.

In this context, the grand projects look like marketing tools, conspicuous gestures that something is being done, and that co-operative city leaders will be rewarded with works on their territory. They may not all need to happen, or not soon, in order to achieve their boosting effect. Some, such as HS2, will be far in the future. This could be a rare example of political long-sightedness, or a neat trick, or a bit of both. “It’s genius,” says Johnson. “You hit it into long grass. You make something sound good and, hey presto, you’ve achieved the political chimera of achieving nothing while looking good.”

‘Standard product’: a Taylor Wimpey home at Milby Hall, Nuneaton Photograph: Taylor Wimpey

The new housing prompted by Osborne’s help-to-buy scheme is palpable. You can see it all over the country in places such as Milby Hall at the Farm, outside Nuneaton, in one of the best known of marginal constituencies. These are at the opposite end of the scale of architectural ambition from the world of OMA, being the standard product of housebuilders such as Taylor Wimpey. They are gawky, could-be-anywhere brick boxes with minimal frills dictated by the (sometimes) tight margins of the business. At the same time, they have odd extravagances: they are obsessively detached rather than terraced, for example, which means two external gable walls have to be built on the sides of houses on either side of a narrow passageway. They can be awkwardly laid out, with a tendency to build homes fronting on to traffic roundabouts.

Help to buy is the scheme whereby, as the official website says, government “helps hard-working people like you take steps to buy your own home” by lending up to 20% of its value on easy terms. Most beneficiaries are almost certainly happy with it and it achieved its aim of stimulating the housebuilding industry at a time when it was sluggish. Much of its purpose was to speed up developments that would have happened eventually in any case, which is why a help-to-buy-assisted house looks like any other.

The scheme’s opponents have accused it of being “economically illiterate” and say it will ultimately push up prices, which would be self-defeating. Even those who see merit in its original introduction question the government’s decision to extend it to 2020. However, the direction of Treasury policy is to augment it with other plans, such as the starter homes initiative and the extension of right to buy to housing associations, which have the same objective of encouraging home ownership with short-lived boosts to affordability. These also attract doubts. “I don’t know anyone who thinks it’s a good idea,” says one in the business about starter homes, whereby public subsidy enables homes to be sold at 80% of market value. “Who says what market value is? The potential for cutting corners and gaming the system is enormous.”

These schemes deliver the opportunities for politicians to be photographed in hard hats, laying bricks and with lucky residents but, despite their tangible reality, they also have an illusionary aspect. They conceal the realities that the country is not achieving anything like its house-building targets, for example, and that promoting home-ownership is coming at the cost of dealing with housing need more widely. “There will be no more subsidy for rented homes – all the money is going into supporting ownership,” says David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation. “Ownership is important but not the only issue.” The result is that “poor people are not being well served and there is a much enhanced potential for unrest and for homelessness”.

It’s easier to see the winners, in other words, than the losers, at least for now. It’s easier to see the new homes for sale that are being built than the new homes for rent that are not. And by now it is becoming clear what are consistent characteristics of the apparently disparate portfolio of Osborne-backed construction projects.

They contain kernels of usefulness, some more than others, and address or purport to address real issues. They combine inflated claims with a diversionary quality and electoral calculation. They involve big business. They sometimes overestimate the power of construction alone to create the future and make the modern British assumptions that “industry” is almost coterminous with “building industry” and “business” with “property business”. Some of them may never happen. They ignore what Nick Johnson calls “granularity” – the small-scale enterprise and initiatives that make places distinctive and prosperous.

The architecture of Osborne’s Britain is hybrid: iconic monuments by iconic designers such as OMA and Thomas Heatherwick in centres of cities, the ruthless viaducts of high-speed railways running between them, scatterings of standard housing around them. The creative energy that goes into the icons is unmatched by much idea of improving the planning or design of everyday space in which people spend their lives.

Perhaps the soul, if it can be called that, of Osborne’s Britain, will be found in Ebbsfleet, north Kent, where he has declared that a “garden city” will be built. It would be the first, he said, for over a century, a statement that flagrantly overlooks the many new towns built on garden city principles after the second world war. “Britain has to up its ambition,” said the chancellor grandiosely. “Britain has to up its game, Britain has to earn its way in the world.”

‘Ambition’: the site of the Ebbsfleet garden city, championed by the chancellor.

The idea of a garden city, developed by and under the influence of Ebenezer Howard in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, includes the co-ordination of built and green spaces, the integration of transport, the combination of places to live and work and the development of new and better types of housing. To achieve these aims requires, as happened with the new towns, the leverage that comes from public or communal ownership of land. As it currently stands, Ebbsfleet has few of these qualities, being rather an ill-connected scattering of housing estates sluggishly developed over many years. The question is whether the chancellor’s support will enable its inner garden city to blossom.

The site is blessed by proximity to the high-speed rail link, which gets to St Pancras station in central London in 19 minutes, to the Bluewater shopping centre and to a Thames frontage. Its disadvantages include a poor infrastructure of drainage, broadband and power supplies and an absence of planning, which means that, for all the speed of the rail link, it takes a half-hour walk along hostile roads from the station to the nearest house. It stands in the workings of extensive former chalk quarries that leave lakes and sheer sides that resemble inward-looking White Cliffs of Dover. These are both assets and problems – they create the potential for a unique landscape but they also require money to convert the terrain into land for building.

The Treasury has promised £310m to Ebbsfleet, of which it expects to get 70% back at some point, with a view to creating “up to” 15,000 homes and a commercial district. A development corporation has been set up. In the combination of work and home it will therefore have something of a true garden city, and a masterplan is imminent, from the consultancy AECOM, which promises to bring sense and connection to its disjointed fragments. Sir Rod Aldridge, formerly of Capita, is hoping to back an academy school where 20-30% of the curriculum will be dedicated to training in entrepreneurship.

It will not, promises the chairman of development corporation, Michael Cassidy, have that “empty Stepford Wives feel” of dormitory suburbs outside working hours. Where it will differ from real garden cities is that the land will not be publicly owned, which means that the development corporation can only nudge and chasten developers into raising their game. It means not creating models of new neighbourhoods to be followed around the country, but getting the housebuilders, Persimmon, contrary to its practice on some developments elsewhere, to provide a door into the garden as well as a front door.

The site is further complicated by the decision of Osborne’s ex-cabinet colleague, the former communities secretary Eric Pickles, to assign part of it to a gigantic new London Paramount Entertainment Resort, an employment generator at such time as it opens, but before that a monster whose demands for road access make a cohesive town centre hard to realise. It doesn’t sound likely that Ebbsfleet will be much like a garden city that Ebenezer Howard would recognise or be proud of.

As developers don’t like to build too much too quickly, the pace of growth is unlikely to be much above 1,000 a year, or about 0.4% of estimated national need. None of which is the fault or responsibility of Cassidy and his team, who will no doubt deliver good and useful things within the limitations set. “I’ve got to work in the realms of the possible,” he says. It’s just that this will not be the world-beating exemplar promised by Osborne. “I’m not sure he’s interested. It’s just a game,” says an informed observer, who speculates that Osborne’s main motive in backing Ebbsfleet was to “stymie” the ambitions of his coalition partners, the Lib Dems, to promote garden cities elsewhere.

A country with better trains, a re-energised north, an acoustically perfect concert hall and other cultural marvels, with new homes provided in well-planned garden cities, with increased home ownership alongside better housing for everyone, with prosperity led by brilliant scientific innovation, perhaps even with nuclear power stations reducing dependency on fossil fuels, would be a wonderful place. It might even benefit from a garden bridge, if it were well designed, well sited and reasonably priced. Even the greatest Osborne-sceptic must concede that at least some of his initiatives will bring some benefits some of the time.

It might also be accepted that to achieve change requires a bit of talking up and a bit of political cunning. But the ratio of rhetoric and opportunism to achievement in Osborne’s Britain is high. The more you look, the less there is to see.