In one of his more conventional television excursions, some 10 years ago, Jonathan Meades lit on Aberdeen and made a convincing case for its particular quality, that of ordinariness. That was despite an opening sequence on the typhoid epidemic that struck the city, not in 1864 as you might guess but in 1964. Four hundred people fell victim to the offending corned beef – though there was only a handful of fatalities – and for a while the alarming episode cast the north-eastern port as a dark place in the public eye.

Yet, almost simultaneously, North Sea oil was turning Aberdeen into a boom town. In 1975 the authors of The Rape of Britain, Colin Amery and Dan Cruickshank, noted it was vying to be “offshore capital of Europe”, servicing and supplying the oil rigs out in the North Sea. The city faced being torn apart to supply a projected doubling in office space for the industry, while house prices soared.

Yet, despite the worries and losses around the harbour (especially in Old Torry) the city survived, largely because of the unusual homogeneity of the built fabric due to the dominance of a single material, granite, and thus the ordinariness that Meades celebrated.

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