The wearer as much as the frock

Peter Campbell

• Building Capitalism by Linda Clarke
  Routledge, 316 pp, £65.00, December 1991, ISBN 0 415 01552 9
• The City Shaped by Spiro Kostof
  Thames and Hudson, 352 pp, £24.00, September 1991, ISBN 0 500 34118 4
• A New London by Richard Rogers and Mark Fisher
  Penguin, 255 pp, £8.99, March 1992, ISBN 0 14 015794 8

Time can play dirty tricks on architects when launch-time promises are recalled to mock crumbling fabric. The progenitors of much post-war public housing suffered in this way. Time finds out bad bets; entrepreneurs are bankrupted financially, planners intellectually. But it has always been like that. Linda Clarke’s Building Capitalism illustrates its argument with a study of Somers Town, where a late 18th-century planner’s promise – to develop an estate of middle-class houses north of the Euston Road – went just as badly wrong as any Sixties development. General Booth himself (the Salvation Army now occupy buildings only a few hundred yards from where Somers Town stood) reckoned it a centre of frightful moral and physical contagion.