When, in 1926, the obviously eccentric WJ Bassett-Lowke dropped Charles Rennie Mackintosh as his builder of choice and commissioned the German Deutsche Werkbund architect Peter Behrens to design him a Modernist house (brazenly called New Ways) in Northamptonshire instead, people simply assumed that Bassett-Lowke had gone mad. A year later, Waugh lampooned Behrens in Decline and Fall as the crazed German architect Professor Otto Friedrich Silenus who tears down a flawless Tudor man- sion to replace it with a piece of rubber-floored Corbusianism. The book sold like hot cakes.The Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in early 1933 changed all this, however. If the cosmopolitanism of Modernists like Behrens and Lubetkin seemed to threaten the Voysey-Woysey British taste for half-timbering and horse- brasses five years before, it was clearly altogether more benign than the pumped-up neoclassicism of Hitler’s favourite, Albert Speer, which replaced it. At one stroke, Modernism came to be viewed as synonymous with anti-Nazism.Its refugee practitioners – most of them forced to flee Germany for being Jewish or Socialist or both – were welcomed with open arms by British architectural practices, eager at last to see what Modernism might look like in the flesh. For their part, the emigre architects regarded their transplantation with grim gratitude rather than any absolute enthusiasm.”Individually, some of them [ie, British architects] were quite good, but most were not that serious,” recalled an unimpressed Erno Goldfinger. “They were full of loose ideas about people, and about how they acted.”Nonetheless, Hitler had given the British Modern Movement the inadvertent shot in the arm it had needed for a decade.

Think of almost any of the iconic buildings of the Thirties and you will find a foreign name behind it: Berthold Lubetkin’s at High Point or the Penguin Pool at London Zoo; Eric Mendelsohn’s at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea; Goldfinger’s at his famous flats in Willow Road, Hampstead; Chermayeff’s at Lord Reith’s Broadcasting House.Quite apart from their creators’ funny foreign names, one reason for the fame which these buildings quickly acquired was, of course, that there were so few of them For this we have also to thank Hitler. If Nazism pepped up British Modernism from 1933 on, it also stopped British building dead in its tracks in September 1939, the last year covered by the Design Museum’s show. By the time the smoke from the Second World War had cleared, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer – the latter already the co-creator of Britain’s first theoretical Concrete City – had left for America, Lubetkin had changed architectural styles and various others had either moved on or died, or both.That was hardly the end of the story, though. By 1939, and thanks almost entirely to the influence of Lubetkin et al, the British Modern Movement was no longer the underground trend it had been a decade before.

The emigres may have found themselves lampooned in British novels and cartoons, but they had bequeathed their British colleagues both a higher professional profile and the courage to follow their convictions.The direct and salutary influence of Gropius on his architectural employer, Maxwell Fry, can still be seen in the latter’s stunning 1935 block of council flats, Kensal House on Ladbroke Grove. Other echt British masterpieces from the British Modern Movement of the late 1930s – Owen Williams’ Peckham Health Centre, say, or H Goodhart-Rendel’s St Olaf House – also show a confidence that had, by and large, been missing from the sparse repertoire of Modernist building in Britain pre-1933. By 1939, too, the Architectural Association and architectural departments at universities such as Liverpool were openly boasting of their Modernist leanings.The students there – including Denys Lasdun (who went on to work for Lubetkin), later architect of the National Theatre, and Arthur Ling, so bemused by his fossilised Georgian professor – were soon to emerge to begin the process of rebuilding British cities (also thoughtfully razed by that inadvertent Moderniser, A Hitler) in a Modernist form. Perhaps most important, though, was the fact that British architecture, pedimented and carriage-lamped a mere decade before, had finally become part of an international movement.Modern Britain 1929-1939: Architecture and Exhibitions is at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 from 20 January to 6 June (0171 378 6055). My favourite food is my own lentil stew with caraway dumplings, eaten in huge amounts while curled up on the sofa. And when I’m sad the only thing that will do is Heinz tomato soup – the cheerful speckled orange is just so comforting and right.

But I do love eating out – as long as it’s nowhere stiff and pretentious. Across the road from me in Sheffield is a cafe-restaurant called Nonna’s (539-541 Ecclesall Road, 0114 2686116). I often meet my friends there for lunch because it’s so cheerful and bustly. They serve plates of crostini and bruschetta misti, topped with different nibbly delights, which are perfect for sharing during confidences and gossip In the evening the food is also sublime. The best starter I’ve ever experienced is their tonno carpaccio – wafer-thin tuna marinated in lemon to create the most delicate melt-in-the mouth appetite sharpener.

When I first had it, my partner and I hardly spoke for fear of wasting a moment of taste-experience. I’ve spent the last two summers in Orkney and heard The Creel (Front Road, St Margaret’s Hope, Orkney, 01856 831311) recommended so often and so highly I didn’t believe anywhere could be that good – but I very happily ate my words. It serves local seafood so fresh it’s practically wriggling, as well as Orkney beef and lamb All of their produce is local. One pudding – a brandysnap basket filled with creme caramel and chocolate mousse, served with a butterscotch sauce, was so sensational it brought furtive tears to my eyes. It felt obscene to eat it in public.
My very favourite way of eating fish is in batter with chips, and the Pierwall Hotel (Pierwall, Westray, Orkney, 01857 677208) serves the best fish and chips in the world It’s a cosy little bar-come-sitting room-come-cafe.