Research for my next book is underway. It will celebrate an overlooked, indeed almost forgotten, period in the development of London’s architecture – the post-war years, from the first shoots of economic recovery, through the boom years, and ending when the oil crisis hit, building stopped and commercial architecture pupated before emerging, damp and gleaming with new colour and uncertain direction, in the post-modern 1980s.

These buildings represent a lost age, a British architecture that combined traditional materials and craftsmanship in a friendly, softer Modernism for a City that was moving from bowlers and brollies to E-Types and the Barbican. It provided great American-style blocks in stone and glass set amongst Roman remains, a perfect world for the new meritocrats.

But the pressure cooker that is the Square Mile has seen demolition of this architecture at a startling, almost careless, pace since the 1990s taking examples modest and grand, mediocre and outstanding. It is a campaign of destruction rivalling that which gave rise to these buildings in the first place.

In its architecture, that lost age showed a vitality, originality and quality that has never been matched, creating a world that has now vanished forever.