Ancient walled cities and vehicular traffic were never meant to meet, whether in Rome or Sandwich. The title of the first chapter in Otto Saumarez-Smith’s Boom Cityis Optimism, Traffic and the Historic City in Post-war British Planning, but that optimism came to mean widely different things to different people. Fifty years on, benighted medieval city centres, pedestrianised within an inch of their lives and then menaced by the excluded traffic, fuming at the gates, offer a pessimistic picture – the freedoms offered by new technologies, new ideas and a revolutionary future seem as distant now as then.

Nowhere suffers more than York. Lionel Brett’s conservation report for the town was one of four commissioned by the government minister Richard Crossman in 1966 for important cathedral cities. “The main object of the exercise,” he wrote, “is to make the walled city liveable again.”

Saumarez-Smith offers Brett (aka Lord Esher) as a model modernist preservationist, while noting his subsequent disillusionment with the exercise and its irreconcilable objectives, leading him to retreat into an attitude of “quietist restraint”.

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