This is weird when you think about it. London was the world’s first megacity. Britain urbanised before any other country and we came up with a fantastic innovation to deal with this: terraced housing. The Georgian and Victorian terraces in our cities are a modest wonder of the world. They range from the palaces around Regent’s Park to the handsome Georgian rows of Islington to the workers’ cottages near Waterloo and are some of the very best high-density housing there is. However, mass urban housing is a bit like football. We may have invented it, and we often hark back to how good we used to be at it. But almost every other country in Europe is now better at it than we are.