There was originally about three times as much text on this page and I lost count of how many times I pruned it down, always getting it shorter but never quite making it short enough!

The trouble is, it was all true and I was loath to lose any of it. The international image of London in the Sixties may have been one of a swinging, fashionable Carnaby Street but, as with many of the other major cities in the UK, much of it was still war-scarred. Twenty years after the end of WW2, my playgrounds really were bomb sites, scrapyards and derelict houses.

And twenty years after that, the total failure of imagination on the part of architects and civic planners, really had produced monstrosities like this.