Why do the British still dream of bricks and mortar?

In Building Soul, Thomas Heatherwick’s recent Radio 4 series, architects are villains. According to the puckish designer of Google’s King’s Cross campus, the profession is in thrall to a ‘cult’ of modernism, intent on forcing us to live in houses that make us ill and work in offices that make us depressed.

Heatherwick is often accused of over-simplification. His latest attack on the architectural profession, and his blaming of Le Corbusier as miscreant-in-chief, is worse. It misrepresents how and why buildings come to be. They are the work not of lone fanatics but of countless competing forces, and mostly political will. But Heatherwick’s fiction contains truthiness: people see dull, uniform apartment blocks being slung up every week. It would be easy to conclude architects must be mad and wrong.

The Labour party now recognises how deeply voters dislike slabby developments.