‘On BBC 2 last Monday,’ noted the Sunday Telegraph’s TV critic Trevor Grove in February 1979, ‘the return of Fawlty Towers was immediately followed by a programme about faulty towers.’ He went on:

This was odd, but on close examination turned out to be without significance. After all, what connection could there possibly be between a comedy series based on the exploits of a domineering, havoc-wreaking megalomaniac called Basil Fawlty and a serious study of what has been done to Britain’s urban environment by a bunch of domineering, havoc-wreaking megalomaniacs who call themselves architects?

The programme was Christopher Booker’s still remembered City of Towers, a ferocious attack on Le Corbusier-inspired concrete high-rise, especially when used for public housing. Five years later, another notable TV documentary, Adam Curtis’s The Great British Housing Disaster, a coruscating, detailed examination of the system building of the 1960s, involving pre-cast slabs and dangerously easy on-site assembly, was a further nail in the coffin for the reputation of postwar high-rise social housing.

Politicians weighed in, too. ‘Slums that defy description’ was Michael Heseltine’s 1987 verdict on Liverpool’s tower blocks. Margaret Thatcher, much influenced by Alice Coleman’s Utopia on Trial (1985), would lament how ‘the vast, soulless high-rise council estates’ had become ‘ghettos of deprivation, poor education and unemployment’, places whose tenants ‘mutually reinforce each other’s passivity and undermine each other’s initiative’ – in short, encapsulating the very worst vices of the welfare state.

Writing about postwar Britain, I have found it hard not to be influenced by this and much similar rhetoric, coming mainly, though not solely, from the right. It has also been difficult not to be shocked by the arrogant disregard of all the surveys over the years conclusively showing........

© The Spectator