An honest blurb for a randomly chosen sample of the UK's 1,000 or so business parks would read something like this: "Welcome to Focuspoint Business Park, a soulless office development at the heart of the UK's mediocre west-eastern economy. Focuspoint offers quick access to mile-long tailbacks on the M64 and is just an hour by rail from a siding reserved for broken-down trains near Watford Junction. Relocating to Focuspoint saves you from meeting potential new customers in pubs, restaurants or snack bars. Instead, you can spend your lunch hours eating petrol station sandwiches at your desk while watching squirrels."

Rumours of the business park's imminent demise do not pain me greatly. In the late 1980s I baled out of a job partly because my employer was planning to decamp from the City to Docklands, then itself no more than a giant business park with unusually poor road infrastructure. Former colleagues who made the move told of unreliable public transport, non-existent amenities and herons flapping around their buildings like portents of doom. Visiting an investment bank in Canary Wharf a few months later, I crossed deserted plazas otherwise only traversed by wind-blown plastic bags in a fair approximation to tumbleweed. The only notebook I could buy in one of the few occupied retail units was a hand-made item of giftware costing £21.