As therapy from wandering round the wastelands of north Vauxhall, I had lunch on the pavement outside Charlie Boxer’s delicatessen, Italo in Bonnington Square. It’s everything the new developments aren’t: anchored in a sense of local community, with streets and a small garden, a sense of human interaction and human scale.

Is it impossible to reproduce this sense of humanity, localism and streetscape in new building or have we just decided to give up on it ?