I remember a meeting back in the early 1990s with Mr Robinson from the highways department in Manchester. We were discussing the highway implications of the Hulme Guide to Development that my friend Charlie Baker and I had been commissioned to write. Mr Robinson was not happy. In his eyes two local residents – because that is what we were; Charlie was doing this through the Hulme Community Architecture Project – had been given rein to mess with his roads and to promote irresponsible ideas like crossroads! (This was long before Manual for Streets.)

Under intense political pressure he eventually conceded the point in Hulme and was famously quoted as saying, “Heaven forbid that this is ever applied to the rest of the city”. Which of course is exactly what happened a year later.

Mr Robinson was right in one respect: a code for a development site, even one as big as Hulme, is very different to a code for a whole city. This distinction had lain behind many of the discussions that we have been having over the last six months co-curating the National Model Design Code with MHCLG.

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