I am a planner who trained with architects. It is a cruel and inhuman practice that has now been largely phased out. However back in the 1980s we planning students would be forced to work on our masterplanning projects while the architecture students who shared the same studio took the piss. Obviously there was a huge amount of ammunition that they were able to use: our questionable dress sense, our risible drafting skills, and our barely concealed megalomania as we laboured over plans for new towns. However they found a particular target in our use of pitched roofs.

As I recall we drew pitched roofs on our masterplans because they were a useful shorthand to denote a building and they also added a sense of depth to our drawings. However to the architects those pitched roofs were something altogether more sinister and political. They had been taught that modernism meant flat roofs and was socialist, whereas pitched roofs betrayed “critical regionalist” tendencies, were pastiche and reactionary. Indeed some of the bolder architect students went as far to say that pitched roofs were “imperialist crowns for buildings”. Those of you who were there in the 1980s, will recall that “Imperialist” was a serious accusation.

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