n the 30 years after the end of the second world war, many British cities embarked on the wholesale destruction of their history. Residential streets were out and tower blocks were in, and cars had always to be accommodated. The dense, extravagant, smoke-stained fabric of the Victorian city came down in clouds of dust. It was often calculated that the country had knowingly obliterated more of its historic buildings in the 1950s and 60s than the Luftwaffe’s bombs had managed in wartime. Behind it all, wrote the architectural historian Gavin Stamp, lay “a sense of shame about the industrial past, a visceral and blinkered rejection of the dark but substantial legacy of the Victorians – fuelled in part by a crude socialist vision – that could amount to little more than civic self-hatred”.
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