Time can play dirty tricks on architects when launch-time promises are recalled to mock crumbling fabric. The progenitors of much post-war public housing suffered in this way. Time finds out bad bets; entrepreneurs are bankrupted financially, planners intellectually. But it has always been like that. Linda Clarke's Building Capitalism illustrates its argument with a study of Somers Town, where a late 18th-century planner's promise - to develop an estate of middle-class houses north of the Euston Road - went just as badly wrong as any Sixties development. General Booth himself (the Salvation Army now occupy buildings only a few hundred yards from where Somers Town stood) reckoned it a centre of frightful moral and physical contagion.

LRB 9 April 1992 | PDF Download