Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Gups]

.

[Gups]

.

[Oexmelin]

At a loss for words?

[Gups]

Football stuff, wrong thread

[garbon]

...

[The Larch]

He makes it sound as if the mini budget was a collection of drunken dares.

[Duque de Bragança]

He makes it sound as if the mini budget was a collection of drunken dares.

Might have started that way, then escalation. 

[Josquius]

The Scottish road gritters are out. Some truly magnificent names oot there:

Oor chilly wins the prize.

[Richard Hakluyt]

He makes it sound as if the mini budget was a collection of drunken dares.

I wish they had just played spin the bottle...might have saved the country the odd £100bn or so 

[Sheilbh]

Not the angle I'd have chosen, but I suppose the Telegraph know their readership

[HVC]

What, tenants want cheaper rent? Are there no prisons?... Are there no workhouses? Those poor landlords.

[Sheilbh]

And again on things that would be the main story for days if it affected reporters based in London:

Third of TransPennine trains cancelled on first day of timetable to add services
'Shambles' entirely predictable, says Labour on first full day of new winter timetable
Helen Pidd North of England editor
Mon 12 Dec 2022 17.23 GMT
Last modified on Mon 12 Dec 2022 17.31 GMT

Almost a third of TransPennine Express train services have been cancelled on a "dreadful" first full day of a winter timetable that is supposed to improve connectivity on key rail routes.

The timetable should have meant hundreds of extra trains added to Britain's beleaguered rail network, including the resumption of three services an hour to and from Manchester to London on Avanti West Coast.

Labour said the "shambles" on Monday was entirely predictable and showed the government had been "staggeringly incompetent" in its dealings with the worst performing companies. Ministers must remove the contracts from failing operators, the shadow transport secretary, Louise Haigh, said.

Last month, the rail minister Huw Merriman said he was confident the timetable was deliverable, despite many warnings from inside the rail industry that it was completely unrealistic against a backdrop of work-to-rule industrial action and staff shortages.

The timetable obliged TPE to reintroduce services on the west coast mainline between Manchester airport and Scotland, direct trains between Hull and Liverpool, as well as the extension of the Cleethorpes services to Liverpool Lime Street via Warrington.

But the rail operator cancelled 115 trains in full or in part, amounting to about 32% of Monday's planned services. As a result, trains that did run were "dangerously overcrowded", according to Tracy Brabin, the mayor of West Yorkshire.

Eighty-eight were cancelled by 10pm on Sunday night, using what is known in rail industry jargon as "p-codes". P-coded services effectively disappear from the timetable and do not appear in official statistics collated by the regulator the Office of Rail and Road. The UK Statistics Authority is investigating how rail statistics are collected and presented after a series of Guardian articles that have exposed the p-code loophole.

Avanti also cancelled many of its trains to and from London Euston on Monday, including two out of four direct services from Holyhead in Wales and many of the Manchester and Liverpool services.

It blamed the cold weather and sickness, with a spokesperson saying one train had to be taken out of service with a cracked windscreen.

"We are seeing some short notice cancellations to our services today due to the weather and sickness but are doing all we can to make sure our trains run. Despite this, the timetable step-up which came into force on Sunday means we are running significantly more services than last week," said they continued.

"Despite this we expect to run between 30% more services today than on previous Mondays. If we take the Manchester route, that means just around 40 services departing for London today as opposed to 23 this time last week."

Haigh said: "This shambles was predictable and predicted. Yet once again, ministers have been staggeringly complacent.

"Enough is enough. Passengers have been taken for a ride for too long. It's time for ministers to wake up and hold operators to account for appalling performance, and a failure to invest in the long-term future.

"Without urgent improvement, they must begin withdrawing the contract."

Brabin said: "It's dreadful that just one day into the new rail timetable we're seeing appalling levels of cancellations and dangerous overcrowding.

"The government promised to get a grip, but the chaos continues, and those of us in the north will be lucky to get a train home from work or college tonight. This can't be allowed to drag on and ruin Christmas, as people will struggle to get to see family and friends."

TPE said the timetable was designed to bring "a number of enhancements" for customers but involved "a huge amount of training for staff", more than other operators.

"To help deliver resilience, and to allow training to take place alongside the running of passenger services, we have worked hard to recruit more traincrew to the business and currently have 507 active drivers – more than TPE has ever had," said the spokesperson.

"However, we continue to experience traincrew availability issues as a result of continued high levels of sickness – which has seen a significant spike in recent days – and the unprecedented training backlog. As a result of these factors, the delivery of the timetable will be challenging from the outset and customers may experience disruption to their journeys."

Edit: Separately, BBC story about a village campaigning to keep a school open that has no new pupils
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-63923869

Via Jim Waterson:

Jim Waterson
@jimwaterson
Official
Grew up near here. Locals oppose almost every attempt to build new houses. Then are disgusted and organise campaigns when everything keeps closing because there's no young people living there.

[Sheilbh]

Also this is Irish politics rather than British - but good summary of the gangland trial that's dragging in Sinn Fein figures. I've mentioned before but Sinn Fein are really not a normal democratic political party:

Gangland 'trial of the century' puts Sinn Féin leader – and party's alleged criminal links – in spotlight
Poll ratings in Ireland dip for Mary Lou McDonald despite her distancing herself from former protege and councillor, Jonathan Dowdall
Rory Carroll Ireland correspondent
@rorycarroll72
Sun 11 Dec 2022 09.00 GMT

It has been called Ireland's gangland trial of the century but weeks of testimony in courtroom 11 of the Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin have morphed into something else: a political test for Sinn Féin and its hopes of leading the next government.

Gerry "the Monk" Hutch, 59, a prominent crime boss, is on trial for a 2016 murder that fuelled a feud between rival gangs that dotted Dublin with corpses.

The evidence, however, has shone a light not just on gangsters but Sinn Féin's alleged links to a criminal underworld, including the relationship between the party's leader, Mary Lou McDonald, and a convicted torturer.

The scrutiny will intensify this week when the torturer, a former Sinn Féin councillor and McDonald protege named Jonathan Dowdall, is to testify about his involvement in organised crime and the republican movement.

Banner headlines in Irish newspapers about the case have already taken a toll: McDonald's personal popularity and Sinn Féin's support both dipped in recent polls. Sinn Féin remains the most popular party but the brake on its momentum, if sustained, would complicate its chances of leading the next government and taking power for the first time in Ireland.

"The case isn't over yet and Jonathan Dowdall's role hasn't been fully unveiled. I think it could get much worse for Mary Lou McDonald next week," said Aoife Moore, a Sunday Times journalist and author of a forthcoming book on Sinn Féin. "There would be a lot of worry in Sinn Féin head office."

No one is predicting a terminal blow to McDonald's leadership. She has not been accused of wrongdoing and has distanced herself from Dowdall. "Had I had even an inkling that he was involved in any form of criminality, much less what he now stands accused of, he wouldn't have been within a roar of me or within Sinn Féin," she told reporters in a fire-fighting blitz of media appearances. The party did not respond to an interview request for this article.

Gerry Adams handpicked McDonald, 53, a middle-class Dubliner with no involvement in the IRA, to succeed him as party leader and broaden Sinn Féin's appeal. The strategy worked. But her image is now tainted. "She was close to Dowdall. It reflects badly on her," said Shane Ross, author of the biography Mary Lou McDonald: a Republican Riddle. "It's a setback but not fatal. Sinn Féin have shrugged off worse issues."

Even so, the trial at the Special Criminal Court, which sits with three judges and has no jury, is making the party squirm.

The case centres on an attack in February 2016: armed men disguised as police stormed Dublin's Regency hotel to target rival gangsters during a boxing bout weigh-in. They killed David Byrne, a member of the Kinahan cartel, stoking a tit-for-tat feud that claimed 18 lives between 2015 and 2018 and still rumbles on. Hutch, dubbed "the Monk" for a relatively restrained personality and lifestyle, denies the murder charge, which carries a life sentence.

Dowdall, 44, was originally a co-defendant but he cut a plea deal and is now serving a four-year sentence for helping the killers.

It has emerged that Dowdall donated money to the party, including €1,000 to McDonald in 2011, and was photographed with McDonald and Adams. In 2014 he won a council seat for Sinn Féin in McDonald's north Dublin constituency.

While a councillor, Dowdall waterboarded a man. Sinn Féin said it had no reason to suspect Dowdall, who had no convictions until being found guilty of torture in 2018. However, the Hutch trial has heard evidence that two party officials quizzed Dowdall about criminal activities before his 2014 election.

Dowdall made the claim in conversations with Hutch recorded by police who bugged his Toyota Land Cruiser, which he allegedly used to ferry the crime boss to meetings with republicans in Northern Ireland.

In a bugged car, Dowdall claimed to Hutch that McDonald had used the Hutch family for money and votes.

The Sinn Féin leader has rejected the allegation. Dowdall himself has put a question mark over the claim. In a statement to Gardai, he said he had lied and exaggerated while conversing with Hutch. "I talk a lot when I'm nervous or uncomfortable."

Moore said the trial might dent Sinn Féin's support but not cause lasting damage. "Mary Lou McDonald has put a lid on it." The party was poised to reap voter anger over a housing crisis, said Moore. "Do I think McDonald will be taoiseach? Yes."[/b][/b]

The line has always been pretty blurred between the paramilitaries and organised crime - and obviously Sinn Fein were the political wing of a paramilitary group (assessed by the Garda and PSNI to still be in charge of Sinn Fein). They're doing very well in the polls on basically a left-wing populist agenda especially around housing which is - amazingly - in an even worse situation in Ireland than the UK, which Fine Gael and Fianna Fail just can't tackle.

Dowdall's evidence so far has included a clarification that when he was talking about getting Republicans to mediate the gang war he meant dissident Republicans and not the IRA - for what that's worth.

[Josquius]

The trans pennine line is an amazing shambles.
Newcastle to London is expensive but otherwise decent. But getting across to Manchester takes just as long and it is a major downgrade when you switch trains.

All trains should be nationalised really. But the services TPE runs are key ones that should be handled by government.

]

Edit: Separately, BBC story about a village campaigning to keep a school open that has no new pupils
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-63923869

Via Jim Waterson:

Jim Waterson
@jimwaterson
Official
Grew up near here. Locals oppose almost every attempt to build new houses. Then are disgusted and organise campaigns when everything keeps closing because there's no young people living there.

Sounds right.
That's just the thing with British nimbyism. Don't build it anywhere it might impact my life in the slightest.... Though you better build it in my neighbours back garden or else.

Odd sudden drop in numbers there. I wonder if its a issue of covid prompting parents to switch to home schooling? No data to hand but anecdotally I've heard this is quite a thing for petty-posh parents.

[Sheilbh]

Great piece (I'm really interested in this topic though) which I think points to one of the reasons for NIMBYism in the UK. That, in part, it was a reaction against projects like this, the demolition of Euston etc.

The line that post-war planners did more damage to British cities than the Luftwaffe isn't generally true of most cities - but it's not without a truth about some awful planning. The loss of some incredible bits of heritage and the alienation people felt from those decisions inspired organised campaigning against things like this or the demolition of St Pancras which are now viewed as near-misses (and, as ever, we were sort of following trends already in play in America ):

London's lost mega-motorway: the eight-lane ring road that would have destroyed much of the city

'We want an entirely different type of town' ... the A40 Westway under construction in 1970. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images
In the car-crazed 1960s, planners came up with a scheme to slash through the capital's inner suburbs with huge freeways. Only fragments were ever built – but they tell of a fate narrowly avoided
Peter Walker
@peterwalker99
Tue 13 Dec 2022 10.00 GMT

As Dom Hallas leads me towards his block of flats, he glances up at the exterior, an endless expanse of dull, brown bricks interrupted by a few tiny windows and a curious-looking zigzag design picked out in lighter stone. "It's true," Hallas admits, opening the heavy security door with an electronic fob. "When I tell people where I live, some do say: 'Oh, I always thought that was Brixton prison.'"

It is an easy mistake to make. Southwyck House, only nine storeys high but almost 250 metres long, looms like a gigantic wall just outside the centre of Brixton. It is one of south London's most obvious and, it has to be said, forbidding landmarks.

Known locally as the Barrier Block, the building looks that way for a reason. It is an almost accidental relic of an alternative history for London, one that would have made the city very different and, as most people would probably agree, significantly less appealing.

This slab of roadside frontage was designed to be not just social housing but also a vast acoustic shield, screening the neighbourhood from the deafening roar of an elevated, eight-lane urban motorway.


Southwyck House. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy

If events had turned out differently, Southwyck House would be perched on the edge of the Motorway Box, a 50-mile, eight-lane ring road built across much of inner suburban London, including Brixton. This was only part of the planners' ambitions. The Box, or Ringway One as it was later titled, was to be the first of three concentric gyratories. Together they would have displaced up to 100,000 people.

The idea sounds almost fantastical now and very few Londoners today have even heard of what would have been the largest one-off civil engineering project ever undertaken in the capital. But it very nearly happened.

When the project eventually unravelled in 1973, thanks to efforts by pioneering anti-roads campaigners plus some political luck, Lambeth council had already designed Southwyck House and cleared the land for it to be built. And so it was, a decision finally approved by a certain John Major, the 30-year-old chair of the council's planning committee.

The idea of the Motorway Box had first emerged a decade before, as the UK headed towards the peak of a near-mania for car-based urban design. A squashed rectangle nine miles across, much of it hoisted on to concrete viaducts and spanning up to 30 metres at junctions, it would have run through areas including Earl's Court, Clapham Junction, Brixton, Blackheath, Hackney Wick, Dalston, Camden and Kilburn.

I live just over 100 metres from where the road would have passed through Denmark Hill in south London. It would have obliterated much of a popular local park before smashing through the Giles Gilbert Scott-designed Salvation Army college and several rows of Georgian homes. Opening my bedroom window would have brought an immediate, unignorable traffic roar.


A 1965 GLC map of the proposed inner ring road, the Motorway Box. Photograph: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Baffling as the idea might seem now, it must be viewed in the context of a time when politicians and planners were panicked about imminent gridlock across the UK's towns and cities as ever more vehicles took to the roads.

The solution they collectively turned to was the inner-city motorway, an innovation that arguably changed postwar cities as fundamentally as modernist architects' tower blocks. Here was an entirely new type of street, one that did away with shop fronts, pedestrians, chance encounters or indeed anything recognisably human-scale. For the first time in centuries of urban life, a street was not a public realm, just a conduit between private spaces.

Other cities had got there already. As early as 1927, Robert Moses, the vastly powerful planner who may well have changed New York City more than any single individual, built his first "parkway", the innocuous-sounding official term for a new type of high speed, car-only urban road. In a 44-year municipal career, Moses oversaw the construction of more than 400 miles of such routes through New York and deep into the suburbs, displacing hundreds of thousands of largely poorer local people, a process he later likened to hacking through the urban landscape "with a meat axe".

The British urban motorway age properly began in 1960, when Ernest Marples, Harold Macmillan's maverick transport minister, tasked a polymath engineer turned civil servant called Colin Buchanan to look into the growing urban congestion crisis and how it might be solved. His eventual report, Traffic in Towns, was published in 1963 and proved so unexpectedly popular it was reproduced as an abridged paperback, selling tens of thousands of copies.

Buchanan is seen in retrospect, perhaps unfairly, as the patron saint of the UK's urban motorway age. But Traffic in Towns did much more than simply set out ways a city could road-build its way out of gridlock. It also urged politicians to consider whether such solutions were actually worth it.

In congested metropolises such as London, Buchanan warned, to guarantee free-flowing traffic would mean entire districts being compulsorily purchased, levelled and rebuilt, with shops and businesses set on walkways one level above huge motorways and parking garages. This would, he noted with some understatement, require "an almost revolutionary approach to questions of land ownership". Politicians could instead consider measures to curb urban car use, for example better public transport or road pricing.


Harold Macmillan (left) and Ernest Marples at the 1953 Ideal Home Exhibition. Photograph: L Blandford/Topical/Getty Images

But Marples was less interested in such nuanced warnings than in the report's prediction that the total number of motor vehicles in the UK would soar from 10.5m in 1963 to 18m just seven years later. "We have to face the fact that, whether we like it or not, the way we have built our towns is entirely the wrong way for motor traffic," Marples told a planning conference. "We want an entirely different type of town."

The planners were ready. One of the most striking things about the Motorway Box is that there was no pivotal figure behind its development, or even a definitive record of someone suggesting it. The idea seemed to emerge as a consensus within the London County Council (LCC), the citywide local authority, after traffic surveys showed a higher than expected proportion of vehicles in the city centre were just passing through and could be channelled around its edge instead.

Even when the route was first sketched out, knowledge of it remained confined to the roads department. The first the LCC's municipal architects heard about it was when they unveiled plans for a housing estate in Clapham Junction, south London, and had to be quietly taken aside and told that one part might need to be moved so it did not sit in the middle of an eight-lane highway.

It was only in 1965 that the LCC's replacement, the Greater London Council (GLC), first told a surprised if initially impressed public about the Motorway Box. The plan was soon expanded to take in two further loops: another motorway-grade circuit slightly further out, using the routes of the North and South Circular roads, and a final orbital along part of what would, two decades later, become the M25.

By 1969 they had names: Ringways One, Two and Three. The proposal was supported by Labour and the Conservatives, who between them held all the GLC seats. In Westminster, the Labour government of Harold Wilson was defined by its love for modern infrastructure and had increased the road-building budget to its highest-ever postwar level. London's destiny seemed set.

This was about more than just a ring road, however big. The capital was on the verge of being definitively tipped into a post-Buchanan future, one where entire areas could be rebuilt for the convenience of the car.

At the Lambeth council archives, in a side room of one of its smaller libraries, you can get a glimpse of this parallel London as envisioned half a century ago, in the form of a three-dimensional model built by council planners in 1968. Made from plywood and cardboard set into a wooden base, the tiny cityscape is defiantly modern, showing rows of broad, slab-like buildings, a series of massive tower blocks rising above them. Through the middle runs a multi-lane elevated motorway.

Shown this without any prior knowledge, you might suspect it was Brasília, or perhaps a new part of Shanghai. But this was the new Brixton, as reimagined for the urban motorway age. It involved demolishing just about all the existing commercial centre, with new retail and residential infrastructure built one level above the roads, including a series of 52-storey tower blocks.

Perhaps even more than the Motorway Box, the Brixton plan exemplifies what looks in retrospect like sheer hubris on the part of the planners. Setting aside whether locals in an area long defined by its street-based life and markets even wanted to move everything to raised walkways, it would have taken up 10% of the UK's entire town centre redevelopment budget.

Unsurprisingly, not much was achieved before the Motorway Box was scrapped. In the end, apart from Southwyck House, the only part to become reality was Brixton's brick-and-concrete modernist recreation centre, and even this was only completed in 1985.


Valerie Kearley watches as the A40 Westway is built outside her house in Shepherd's Bush, London, in 1970. Photograph: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

As the GLC and Lambeth dreamed of their concrete utopias, the world around them was changing. Several decades ahead in the urban game, New Yorkers had become tired of Robert Moses' endless highways, bridges and tunnels, none of which seemed to make the city's notorious traffic any better.

In 1969, while the Ringways plan was being finalised, New York's mayor, John Lindsay, scrapped Moses' proposal for a massive freeway across lower Manhattan, after pressure from a new breed of activists who had started to ask, for the first time in the automobile era, whether cities should be designed around motor vehicles or human beings.

Most prominent was Jane Jacobs, the visionary urbanist and writer whose idea of a successful city centred on a necessarily organic and unplanned "ballet" of street-based life proved hugely influential in subsequent decades.

Such radical ideas were less embedded in London, and opposition to the Ringways came mainly from a string of small and fragmented local campaigns. But a near-miracle was at hand. In 1970, with the GLC on the verge of starting construction, Wilson's government unexpectedly ordered a public inquiry, seemingly spooked by the scale of what was about to be done.

The inquiry eventually ruled that the Motorway Box should go ahead, if not the outer loops. But crucially, it gave opponents two years to coalesce under the banner of the London Motorway Action Group (LMAG). This was led by Labour MP Douglas Jay, whose inspired tactic was to focus less on persuading the public and more on changing minds within a much smaller but more influential constituency: the London Labour party.

Many Labour-run councils were already deeply worried. While the official estimate was that 20,000 households would be displaced by the Ringways, an LMAG analysis put it at 100,000, and there was no apparent plan for how, and where, these people were going to live. It was also becoming clear that Buchanan's predictions about growing car use were overstated. By 1970, rather than his expected 18.5m vehicles on the UK's roads, there were 13.5m.


Michael Heseltine talks to a journalist at the opening of the Westway flyover, with a protest banner in the background. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

Concerns had not been eased by the arrival of the Westway, the two-and-a-half-mile elevated motorway intended to connect the western side of the Motorway Box to central London. A reduced budget for rehousing households along its route meant that Michael Heseltine, the young and very junior transport minister dispatched in July 1970 to formally open the road, was greeted by a vast banner reading "Get us out of this hell", draped across the top of a terrace of homes just 25 metres from the eight lanes of traffic.

By 1971 Jay had persuaded the association of Labour-run London councils to oppose the Ringways. In June 1972, this position was adopted by the party's GLC group. But Labour was now in opposition. Both the ruling GLC Conservatives and Ted Heath's Tory government wanted to press ahead.

It all came down to the next GLC election, in April 1973. Helped by another Jay tactic – he persuaded a series of independent anti-road candidates to stand down and avoid splitting the vote – Labour won 58 seats against 32 for the Conservatives. The Motorway Box was dropped. Six months later the oil crisis sent petrol prices rocketing, and spending on roads was slashed. The scheme was history.

Apart from Southwyck House, a few ghosts of this alternative London exist. In Shepherd's Bush, west London, the A3220 road turns mysteriously and briefly into a motorway, connecting to the Westway at a huge roundabout that still has the stubs of a slipway where the ring road was to head east. On the other side of the city, a small stretch of the Box was built between 1967 and 1970, from Hackney Wick to Kidbrooke.

Elsewhere across the UK, of course, the planners had their way. Birmingham's "concrete collar" of an inner ring road was opened in 1971. By this point, vehicles had been roaring through Glasgow on the M8 for several years. Leeds even branded itself "the motorway city of the 70s", which was stamped on outgoing mail.

We now live in a very different urban era. Most UK cities have shifted definitively towards the Jane Jacobs idea of streets as a venue for life, not a means of high-speed travel. And with this has come gentrification.

Like many similar blocks, Southwyck House saw years of neglect and decline. But its proximity to central Brixton, plus the fact it faces out on to the fashionable restaurants and bars of Coldharbour Lane rather than an eight-lane road, means flats there can change hands for up to £400,000.

Dom Hallas shows me around the interior of his apartment, nestled across three floors, the living space and bedrooms flooded with light from floor-to-ceiling south-facing windows. In contrast, the few windows looking northwards towards the road are tiny and double-glazed, connected only to corridors or the bathroom and recessed into a sprawling exterior intended to muffle and deflect a 24-hour cacophony of noise that never came. "It's actually a lovely place to live," Hallas says, leading me out to a sunny balcony. "Particularly without a motorway next door."

One of the many paradoxes of Southwyck House is that the man who ultimately decided it should exist became such a trenchant critic of its architecture. In 1995, as prime minister, John Major made a speech condemning what he called the "grey, sullen concrete wastelands" of inner cities.


Architect Magda Borowiecka. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

The comments greatly amused Magda Borowiecka, the pioneering Polish-born architect who led the design team for Southwyck House and has spent the decades since battling against having her career defined by a building most people simply don't understand.

Borowiecka was given just a year to draw up the plans, drawing inspiration from Sheffield's famous Park Hill estate, with flats that span the width of the building and are spread over several floors, slotting together like a three-dimensional puzzle. Now 92 and still living in Lambeth, a couple of miles from her creation, she is quietly proud of how she tackled the task.

"The thing that has annoyed me all this time is that so many more people see it from the outside than they do from the inside. It's so much nicer inside," she says.

While Southwyck House is now seen as something of a defining Brixton landmark – a local brewery even uses its zigzag brick motif on its cans of lager – the block's unlikely origins and mixed history exemplify the way critics of modernism, such as Major, can focus on the wrong target.

The postwar rebuilding of so many UK towns was not just a story about tower blocks; it was also about rapid motor traffic. In Ville Radieuse, Le Corbusier's 1930 manifesto for a rational new form of city, the high priest of modernism was explicit that his uniform skyscrapers should be connected to road arteries that prioritised vehicle flow, with only minimal smaller streets because "crossroads are an enemy to traffic".

Modernism could, theoretically, have happened without wholesale car use. But the personal motor vehicle – sleek, functional and mass-produced – was central to the way cities were rebuilt, not trundling meekly along a local street but moving at speed on an urban motorway, the bare concrete and soaring pillars echoing the buildings around them.

However, as Borowiecka has learned, when fashions change it is the architects who tend to bear the brunt rather than the road engineers. "Southwyck House is a unique building, and it was a unique project to be given," she says. "People see it and think, 'Why does it look like that?' And the answer is very simple: it was the car. The car made it all."

Mad to think that in the 70s Lambeth Council had Tories - it's now got 63 councillors, 58 are Labour, 3 Lib Dems and 2 Greens.