I don’t know if it’s still true or even if it was true then, but when I was in Cairo in 1983 they told me you didn’t have to pay tax if your building had no roof. And this was the reason why most of the buildings seemed to be either half built or half falling down. The predominant style was the six or seven storey concrete block topped off with a melange of scaffolding, rubble, piles of unused bricks, flying a tattered tarpaulin as a flag.

When I look at the majority of current web design I get the same feeling. It’s just not finished, or worse still, not even started. Random construction lines carve up the screen shifting and vibrating in a most alarming fashion. Words are still kept in boxes, as if their owners were afraid they might fall off or run away. Words in print graphics haven’t been kept locked up like that since cold composed metal typesetting.

The way they arrange the nuts and bolts and planks at Travis Perkins is more elegant, more logical and indeed more user friendly than internet data. One has to admire the workmanlike way in which technical teams have laid out their tools and their raw materials on a site like Amazon, and you have to admire the sheer range and number of nuts and bolts they’ve got but remember this a virtual world. They can give themselves an infinite number of lives just like Space Invaders in your bedroom on Amiga. [up.down.left.right.select.select.fire, all within about a second and half]. But this way of life has no future; look at the number of geeks spending their hard-earned .com cash on treatment for arthritis. We’ve all ended up living in a shantytown living hand to mouth and it’s our own fault.

There are some lovely hand built sheds on the outskirts, built in quaint html vernacular style and some amusing student experiments that go off with a flash and a bang. But nobody has come up with a large-scale design that does any more ambitious than stitching together several bigger sheds and setting off fireworks on the roof. Stig of the Dump has had to be very hard working and versatile to survive in this post apocalyptic vision of the world but he is used to it because most of Shoreditch used to look like that anyway.

However there’s a Pizza Express on Curtain Road now and girls in combat gear wandering around looking for the delicatessen and somewhere to buy lipstick. It’s a shame that the first big surge of cash was all used up in vain attempts to build the biggest, tallest, dirtiest pile of junk. Nobody thought of putting in plumbing and first fix electric’s, The Radiant City doesn’t exist, only old fragmented, imperfect, improvised buildings. But that shouldn’t stop us from making plans and models and dreaming of the next big thing. A recession.