This is a really bad number to have. London has too many skyscrapers to pretend to be a low rise, historic European city, but not enough to get that wonderful mass effect of lots of towers together, which makes New York look so fantastic. In fact, if you stand on Primrose Hill, London’s skyline is a mess. It looks a bit like a mid-sized city in Iowa. The best bits are are the areas with most tall buildings: the City and Canary Wharf. Here, best is relative - both of these would be greatly improved by having many more high-quality tall buildings.

OK, you might say, from a distance skyscrapers look great. But what about up close? How can a skyscraper compete with the fine grained intimacy of a Georgian Square? In fact, I think it can. There’s the drama of turning a corner and seeing something that shoots up into the heavens like a glass and steel beanstalk. The skyscrapers that don’t work well close-up are those that ignore the need to have human-scale stuff at street level; in architects’ parlance, they “land badly”. What made people hate Centre Point for years was not the building itself but the traffic, the rubbish-filled fountain, and the piss-scented underpasses that surrounded its base.