Moore married older successful women who financed his early years.

Yes poor old Chalkhill. Social engineering in a once decent neighbourhood. My father worked on its construction. At least it was handy for him to get to.

^ No Victorian slums were replaced by Chalkhill. It was the prime " Metroland" beloved of John Betjeman.

The Front Line was the North Circular Road in those days.

Social engineering pure and simple.

Oh, I know that area was Metroland, I was talking about these designs in general.

The original council housing estates in the 1930's were a significant step-up in housing for the working classes, indeed, my grandparents council house built in the 1950s was significantly larger, better built and with a larger garden (not to mention more cost effective) than those hideous 1970s semi-detached monstrosities that are the blight in Blighty.

Of course, with the council housing, particularly on the larger estates, you can't choose your neighbours and there is the rub. As Formby states "How do we design well for people who refuse to live well? We cannot design out bad behaviour." And that was one the criticisms I use to hear about the estates they built on the Wirral to rehouse those who lived in the Birkenhead and Liverpool slums - the idea was that they would be raised-up, but actually it brought the locals down to their level. Whether that's true or not, I don't know.

One of the roughest estates, with at one time the highest number of heroin addicts per 1000 population in Europe, was the Blacon estate in Chester.

I guess that, if you live in some of these places, you need heroin just to get through the day. If I ruled the world, not only would every day be the first day of spring - but every council estate in Blighty would be replaced with varying lookalikes of the Hollywood set for Mrs Miniver.

So I dumped the AdP bottle and am now back to Trumpers Lime