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And just as the French planners had difficulty ceding to garden spaces, so do English planners today in ceding to streets; proper streets, that is. The idea of the street beloved of the English is that pathetic computer mock-up of Prince Charles' Poundbury, with homely little shops, one man and a bicycle (old-style bike, of course) and yes, somewhere a car, but a cuddly sort of car.

In short English city planning, in particular in the sixties and seventies did not believe in streets, having rather an anglo-saxon obsession with open spaces. In fact the main contribution that the English have made to urbanism (a word which naturally exists uneasily in the English language) is the Garden City; a quite understandable response to the kind of cities described by Engels or Dickens or Gissing. But it was not the tower blocks that made 60s architecture fail; it was the obsession with space or Space or spaces; rather than with streets, streets that went from A to B; big busy streets. That is what cities are all about. English city planning? Its fundamental creed? Create a "space" then turf it. (What is this thing about grass?) Even the ostensibly more metropolitan visions of such as Richard Rogers in his recent City book are full of spaces; his ideal seems to be Paris; but Paris is not full of spaces; and where there are "spaces" they are full of pseudo-medieval "street acts", even…mime artists, for god's sake! No thanks. Also if we look at drawings of these spaces where are the buggies, where are the plastic bags, where are the goofy gangs of Norwegian youths who have had their hair sprayed green (bless 'em) in Covent Garden? No, these envisioned spaces are enlivened only by little knots of gracefully tapering wraiths that I recall Alan Bennett calling "Precinct People".

Be cautious of those who wish to create spaces with human happiness in mind. Beware of aims such as those of Jacobs and Appleyard (in their Toward an Urban Design Manifesto); they promise us "liveability, identity and control, access to opportunity, imagination and joy; authenticity and meaning, open communities and public life; self reliance and justice."

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