Architects are the worst people to ask about taste and beauty. Individually they may have impeccable style, but collectively the education of the architect has conditioned many to empathise with a narrow canon of Modernism segueing into Brutalism, but stopping at Post Modernism. In the well-worn, worn-out, argument that pitches classical architecture against modern, there is a whiff of righteous superiority claiming any design quoting the past is pastiche and bankrupt.

In his recent book The City of Today is a Dying Thing, Des Fitzgerald reminds us of Corbusier’s mantra that we must “break with the past”. He goes on to describe Downing College in Cambridge as the most grimly traditional and backwards-looking part of the UK’s most grimly traditional and backwards-looking city.

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