A century ago the world looked towards London as a beacon of enlightened housing. The combination of an arts and crafts architecture that saw the home as the heart of culture and society, a progressive London County Council concerned with building decent homes for the working classes and a moment in which a generation of radical and serious architects was at work produced a rich and influential seam of domestic design.

A century before that exquisitely restrained city terraces had developed a formal but flexible language of urban form that has rarely been bettered. And between those two peaks the Victorians built the endless rows of inventive and robust terraces that still form the backbone of the city’s property market. But, in the past century, not much that is admirable, influential or important has happened.