Visitors to Stonehenge, the ancient stone circle, often ask: "Why was it built?" One might feel a similar urge to question when passing through a variety of locations where slabs of ungainly concrete pass for architecture. Broadmead Shopping Centre in Bristol springs to mind as does Elephant & Castle in south London and Middlesbrough in north-east England
It can be hard to suppress the urge to call down bombs to rain upon these places, as suggested in John Betjeman's notorious ode to Slough. And this is pretty much what the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects proposed in a recent interview.
Under George Ferguson's novel proposal, aesthetically objectionable buildings would be granted a Grade X listing. Their demise would be hastened via financial incentives or tax breaks. Initially, this plan sounded so rational that I found myself scribbling out a list of architectural wallflowers for Mr Ferguson to bulldoze.
But like many ideas that seemed admirable at first glance, this one doesn't stand much close scrutiny. While I agree with the novelist Tom Wolfe, who described post-war architecture as "that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one's bourgeois soul", others may not. And the reason we will not see the office of the deputy prime minister rushing to embrace the idea is that artistic taste is incredibly subjective.
While I would love to give a Grade X listing to Madonna, the pop singer, this is not a universal view. The grimness of many European buildings of the 1960s now appears self-evident, but someone must have thought they were a good idea at the time. Just as the Victorian Society had to fight tooth and nail to preserve London's Royal Albert Hall, now a much-beloved landmark, what if we destroy the concrete cubes, only for future generations to develop a taste for their style?
Other problems spring to mind: who, exactly, would administer the kiss of death to these ungainly buildings? Would you leave such issues of taste to Tony Blair, the prime minister - a man who recently appeared in public wearing Burberry, the favoured cloth of the chav? In reality, no doubt, it would be a faceless government quango that would sound the death knell for the unloved edifices - a Ministry of Taste, perhaps: a prospect with rather totalitarian echoes. One can almost picture property magnates and architects posting anonymous notes urging the destruction of rival buildings.
Common sense suggests that change should come from the application of market forces. If tenants boycott ugly buildings, then sooner or later they will be razed to the ground anyway. You may already be seeing a foretaste of this trend in the office sector of European cities. Talk to agents and they will tell you there is a formidable gap between "grade A" properties and the rest of the market.
Grade A - defined as modern, top-notch space - is not only attracting much more juicy rents but is also relatively less prone to voids. Then there is grade B, which may be five to 10 years old and in reasonably good condition. And lastly there is grade C, described by one property expert as "the pretty awful stuff" and another as "centrally heated crap".
Mostly built in the 1960s and 1970s, this is prime X-listing territory. But there are private investors, backed with bank loans, who have bought grade B and grade C property because it is less expensive - particularly in the current environment of low rents and high asking prices for buildings where bargains are far and few between. Grade B has often proved a sound investment.
But grade C is cheap for a reason; many of these buildings are in need of repairs or a revamp. And the tenants don't exactly love them - especially not when they have the upper hand in the market, as is the case now.
At present there is about 92.9 sq m (1 m sq ft) of empty grade C space in the City of London. So what happens to these buildings? Eventually they will get redeveloped - without the help of Mr Ferguson's wrecking ball. It's called progress.
