The shops they appear to want are the vast superstores that continue to gobble up and despoil acres or what was once countryside, or land that could have been used for something of more lasting value. Rogersville will always be impossible to build if the people of this country want to shop in these retail juggernauts. Doubtless blondes with clipboards working for Machiavellian market research firms will have proved over and again that driving out to superstores to load up with the week’s shopping is what we want. The less prosperous settle, in descending order, for edge-of-town executive cul-de-sacs, suburban semis and, most humbling of all, flats above shops in city centres – which, of course, the professional classes of Paris, Berlin and Barcelona find chic.Most of the underprivileged who live above shops in English city centres dream of living in a house in a leafy suburb.

Their children might “rough it” in the city in their twenties, but always with one eye on settling in the country 10 years down the line. It would have astounded Lord Reith too, who lived in a London run by the progressive London County Council which believed in encouraging and, when necessary, providing integrated metropolitan services.Rogersville is stillborn, too, because of the suburban mindset of the British governing and enterprising classes.When men and women become wealthy, they retreat to the country, imagining themselves as country squires and distancing themselves from Norrisian Man (those “dreadful human beings” with whom they may be forced to share buses and Tube trains). Since then, London has never really been planned.In fact, from 1979, the idea has been anathema: the Greater London Council was abolished in 1986 as an act of political spite, the red buses deregulated and every attempt at citywide co-ordination undermined.Such dogmatic and unprecedented interference by national government astounds the current mayors of Paris and Barcelona (the latter bombed, but not gutted, by Franco, Mussolini and the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War). Their long-term future will be very different from Liverpool’s.When London was rebuilt after the years of austerity in the “You’ve never had it so good” Fifties and Sixties, property speculators were given a virtually free rein to reshape it. Yet they are essentially European in spirit (or even a little American: witness the grid-iron of Glasgow’s austerely planned, yet rollicking centre) and, beneath a veneer of privatisation and free-marketeering remain civic- minded. Post-war urban planning in England was, as Liverpool proved, fundamentally anti-urban.Only in Scotland, in the examples of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, can cities of a Barcelona bent be experienced in these islands.

All enjoy compact, vital centres; ships still sail from the ports of the old Hanseatic League right into the granite heart of Aberdeen.These cities have suffered (especially Glasgow) from the cupidities of road-engineers, the ambitions of local politicians, the folly of contemporary dogma (Glasgow’s bus service, for example, is a disgrace). And wherever they went, they destroyed elegant tracts of Georgian and Regency city. By 1995, Liverpudlians would all be wealthy, motorised and commuting by elevated dual-carriageway. The roads were designed to take people out of the city centre, the very opposite of the ideal of European planning. Merseybeat and the Fab Four were, in historical terms, sparky diversions from the true plight of a city in economic peril (significantly, when the Beatles struck rich, they Cuban-heeled it down to London where, like stockbrokers, John, George and Ringo bought big houses in the Surrey suburbs; only Paul chose to live in town).Ironically, it was in Liverpool that contemporary planning principles were applied with almost incomparable rigour.Sadly, these plans were based almost exclusively on road building. Just as the beginnings of real prosperity came to much of Britain in the Fifties, so her traditional industries collapsed Great liners no longer berthed along Pier Head Fewer ships were built across the Mersey in Birkenhead.