Brutalist buildings are the elephants in the city. You can’t pass a brutalist building without noticing it because a brutalist building reaches down, grabs you by the throat and shouts in your face. And it’s because of this uncouth behaviour that admitting to liking these thugs often feels like confessing to some kind of perversion. You can almost imagine that to buy specialist literature on the subject—books with racy titles such as Raw Concrete, This Brutal World and Concretopia—you’ll have to whisper in the bookseller’s ear before a copy will be discreetly pulled from a secret place and presented to you in a plain paper bag.

‘How can you possibly like something that looks like a multistorey car park?’ My brother-in-law gives a laugh, just to emphasise the obvious madness of the notion. It’s a rhetorical question but still I can’t stop myself from trying to formulate a response. It’s not as though it’s the first time anyone has asked that, although they sometimes use military bunkers, air raid shelters or power stations for comparison instead of car parks. They mean buildings made from concrete and more specifically they mean buildings that are ugly, in their eyes at least.