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The origins of the house with gardens which constitutes so much of the fabric of London can, in a simple-minded way, be connected to the saying the Englishman's "home is his castle". This will do, though it is obviously more complicated than that. Rasmussen cites Elizabethan decrees that new houses may be built only as long as there are unbuilt-on grounds attached to the building. We might here see the origin of the town garden. Whatever the causes of the English love of house and garden it can easily be seen that the idea of flat living, so common in so many other cities, has not until recently prevailed in London. Now, of course, we have become very much a city of flat dwellers since a large percentage of the houses have in this century been converted into flats; (and this does not make for great flats).

But there have been flats: we could identify four moments when the idea of flats was tried: simply we could sketch their history as the Mansion, the Court, the House, the Tower.

The Mansion belongs to the last decades of the nineteenth century: large, ostentatious, redbrick (the kind of buildings we now look on as posh but which were, in E.M Foster's Howards End described as vulgar.)

The next distinct wave was the Court; from the 1930s onwards there were grand blocks in central London, much less grand in Kilburn, Balham, Chiswick etc. Du Cane Court in Balham is a huge block,in plan swastika–like; (it is said its architect was an enthusiast of Nazi Germany in the thirties). A mummified baby (goes South London folklore) was found in one of the storage lockers. I live in such a block: Sandhurst Court in Brixton, built in 1935.

Then there is the House,( primarily LCC or Council or Trust Housing ; decent red brick, balconised, modestly utopian); and the Tower; the benighted Tower is the sixties contribution to flat living in London. Yesterday I visited a friend who lives in a Tower overlooking Shepherd's Bush Green. From his fifteenth floor sitting room, looking westwards, you can see 747s floating in towards Heathrow. If you look thirteen floors below you will see a smallish walled piece of lawn, studiedly asymmetrical, with a see-saw in the centre.
This uninviting little Eden is, on the floor list in the lift, indicated by the initials A.D. On investigation this turns out to stand for Amenity Deck (one thinks of the Exclusion of Adam and Eve from the Amenity Deck. Certainly this fine day there was nobody there.) The word deck is significant. Does it resonate (a little and belatedly) with Le Corbusier's appeal for the example of maritime architecture? The Empress of France, perhaps, whose decks he describes as "pure, neat, clear, clean and healthy".

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