I have an inner turmoil about John Betjeman. His work in trying to save distinguished buildings of the Victorian era was little short of heroic. He brought to the process not just sentimentality and nostalgia – though there was some of that, and quite right, too – but also a real understanding of architecture that made him so persuasive in his advocacy of builders, such as George Gilbert Scott, who were then acutely out of fashion. Betjeman grasped that buildings have an intellectual clout: that one understands a civilisation by its works of art. If you destroy them, then our comprehension of the past becomes commensurately limited.

In his television programmes, be they paeans to Metroland or short films showing him trundling through England on now long since dismantled branch lines, Betjeman had the knack of conveying his love of landscape and the importance of buildings within it to an audience whose understanding of such niceties was usually less than his. Some would attribute this to his deft choice of words in the script, as one might expect of a poet. And that brings me to my problem with Betjeman: I just don’t think he was good at poetry.