Wake up: Britain is being demolished under our very noses

Something very important is going on out there, and I’m not sure that anyone has really noticed. Just look out of your window and you are likely to see fundamental changes happening to the place where you live. Cranes are out in force, a great metallic forest of them; our roads are populated by concrete mixers and lorries full of demolition waste; white vans full of electricians, plumbers and carpenters clog the streets, and their skips are two-deep on the roadsides. Everywhere you look there is scaffolding. This is not just the Olympics â” although the size of the construction programme there is breathtaking â” nor just the construction of more skyscraping offices in the City: it affects every town and city and a fair few villages too. Britain is, in fact, being rebuilt under our noses.

Of course Britain has always been rebuilt, whether by the Romans, by the Georgians or by the Victorian railway pioneers flinging tracks across the countryside and into the heart of mediaeval cities. Industries grow up and die, settlements flourish and wilt, fashionable areas become slums, and then the slums themselves become fashionable. But today there is no doubt that we are, again, in a radical and far-reaching state of physical change and, if the government can sustain the pace, it is going to get faster and more furious. The strange thing is that for anyone in their late seventies this will all sound and look disconcertingly familiar.

In February 1943, with the bombs still dropping, the National Gallery opened an exhibition called Rebuilding Britain. It had been inspired by the Royal Institute of British Architects, who realised that the effects of bombing alone would mean that there would have to be a major physical reconstruction of the country when the war ended. It was a brave and very modern event putting to the public the scale of the opportunity and the risks if it all went wrong.