Of course, the newspaper and its proprietor, Pearson plc, have every right to optimise its costs; by shifting to a cheaper printing house, the “pink ‘un” will save between £5m and £6m a year. The news that the purpose-built Financial Times printing press in London’s Docklands is to be sold next spring after just seven years in the FT’s hands came as something of a surprise last week. John Major’s remarks last week were not just historically inaccurate but deeply insensitive at a time when we are looking afresh at the way 50 years ago we set out to rebuild the fabric of our country Political point-scoring is no aid to understanding.. Perhaps the next time you take a look at prefabricated or brutal post-war British architecture you will see the influences and ravages that guided the shaping spirit of architects’ imagination in a time of making haste after carnage and destruction.It is wrong to blame any particular party or professional group for the fast and brutal architecture of the post-war years It was a response to a real national emergency. The crusaders famously brought the spark that ignited Gothic architecture from Palestine to France. Vanbrugh was a soldier before he was an architect; when he designed Blenheim Palace, a nation’s present to the first Duke of Marlborough for his victory over the Dutch at Blenheim, he decorated it in arms and heraldry of war.This line of historical thinking could extend from the Assyrians to the atom bomb: architects have always been profoundly influenced by war.

The Romans fell in love with Egyptian architecture and design and began decorating Rome with Egyptian monuments. Wholemeal because, like those crumbly biscuits, this type of architecture was ostensibly good for you.If the Second World War brought specific strands of thought and obsessions to British architecture, it was not unique in doing so. War and new movements in architecture have gone sword-in-mailed-fist since any one nation marched into another and defeated it in battle. It was a rococo reaction to the experience of the Second World War that said: let’s forget the horror, let’s have some fun.

What we mustn’t do is wallow in the horrors and mechanics of war, as the Brutalists appeared to be doing.There was a third architectural reaction to the War, which (stealing a line from the architect John Outram), is best described as the Wholemeal school of design: all those decent, worthy, tweedy, bricky, unassuming buildings that housed and schooled a generation of children from the early Fifties. If the D-Day Brutalists might be seen as carnivores in the zoology of post-war British architecture, those – led by Hugh Casson – who gave shape to the Festival of Britain of 1951 were herbivores. The spirit that infused the Festival of Britain and the whimsical architecture that followed in its skirts – all those New Towns – was determinedly optimistic. It is difficult, however, to make the brutal beautiful, although great architects of the past, Nicholas Hawksmoor most memorable among them, did precisely that – think of Christ Church, Spitalfields, think of the terrifying King William block he built at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, in 1702.Nevertheless, this German assault on British architectural sensibilities was only the most strident of the ways in which our towns were rebuilt. You need only look at the design and build quality of such basic war material as sub-machine guns to see how, as more guns were required at an ever lower cost, what started out as something deadly but highly wrought, ended up a brutal, and brutally crude, device that was designed to last in action for no more than a few days. What mattered in war was the function, practicality and effectiveness of a particular aircraft, gun or building.

And it was precisely this spirit of brute functionality that thumped the face of British architecture from the late Forties until the end of the Sixties.Many British architects fought in the war. For some, such as James Stirling, later to become an international star, the war meant being gunned down by a Tiger tank. Others remember the visual impact of the superbly designed and, in their own way, rather beautiful Normandy defences, which, like the Maginot Line, proved to be all but redundant when the Western Allies invaded France in 1944. Here was not just typical German thoroughness, but an approach to war architecture that reflected, and brutalised, some of the most significant currents pushing the Modern movement forwards in the Twenties and Thirties.