While London’s skyline continues to look like a tribute to Albert Steptoe’s teeth, Paris’ longstanding ban on buildings above 37 metres proves that cities don’t need skyscrapers to thrive. This could describe countless recent blandvelopments in cities across the UK:

Nor are the zones created at the feet of towers convincing evidence that they enrich cities socially, spatially or culturally. If you go to the new multistorey districts in London, you’ll tend to find arid, lifeless places, lacking in specific character, their residents removed from street life by lifts and lobbies, their mood set by could-be-anywhere landscape design and by those chains that can pay the rents for their retail outlets. As for their supposed modernity, skyscrapers are like air travel: they used to be as glamorous as the jet set, but now they’re in a Ryanair phase – generic, dull and predictable, a default option for unimaginative property companies.