My friend Patricia Brown told me a story last week about the new wooden gardening trug her five-year-old nephew gave her for her birthday. “Don’t worry Aunty Pat,” he said. “It’ll soon dirty up.”

She told the story because we were looking at pictures of the Liverpool Waters scheme, designed by Chapman Taylor, and discussing the threat from Unesco to delist the city’s historic waterfront as a World Heritage Site. A cursory flick through the CGIs provided by a Google search didn’t elicit a very favourable response from the table. My first instinct was to ask where all the trees were and as we continued to discuss the developers’ proposals, we all agreed that, of course, you can’t tell anything from a CGI.

Our conversation moved on to the Design District on the Greenwich Peninsula, which one of our fellow diners had been to wander around that day. He worried that it might end up being a triumph of overdesign, a collection of buildings all designed to be different just for the sake of it with little thought for the experience of the people who will populate and use it every day.

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