Housing, important as it is, does not alone determine the nature of communities or the shape of cities. Cities are organic structures and their many small parts do fit together once we understand how they work. Looking back on the 1960s it is hard to believe that the country could be blinded to the excesses of mass housing and the blighting of cities. People were so mesmerised by the newness, the drama and power of the giant cranes, gleaming white concrete and futuristic designs that they literally looked down on their heritage of close-packed, small, soot-blackened streets. At least the designers, planners and politicians did. But the constantly recreated problems of the ‘old slums’ made the government think again. After 40 years of almost total obsession with new housing, cities were very much the worse for wear yet three quarters of the old ‘street communities’ were still standing – battered but not broken.

In the late 1960s, protests against clearance proposals had begun and ‘race riots’ bubbled over in areas like Holloway, London, where displaced young black people occupied the streets with literally nowhere else to go. Something had to give, and in the mid-1970s, almost as easily as slum clearance had been introduced, the whole approach was put into reverse. A new philosophy of ‘small is beautiful’ emerged among community activists. Small is beautiful, a bible of modern environmental thinking, argued that unless we paid attention to the local human scale of communities, we would destroy our own substance and wreck ‘spaceship earth’.

Meanwhile, Old houses into new homes, a modest government White Paper on the rehabilitation of existing homes, reflected the new reality. The policy of ‘patching up’ older houses in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War developed into a widespread rescue of historic terraces. General Improvement Areas introduced in 1969 could attract a totally new subsidy for environmental work, traffic calming on residential streets and external improvements to houses. Many areas scheduled for clearance, some for as long as 40 years, could now be renovated and refitted instead, if local authorities lifted clearance orders.