On Midsummer eves, David Lock and his colleagues used to go to the top of Midsummer Boulevard with a few beers and try to stay awake. When dawn came, it would hit still-undeveloped fields and the houses containing their sleeping children. It would catch the tops of modernist buildings and half-finished roads to nowhere.
It would hit the long parks, the sapling-lined roads, and the cycle paths separated — decades before it was fashionable — from those roads. The sun would, as you would expect of this particular city, illuminate cows made of concrete.
Finally, as Lock and his fellow town planners headed home to bed, the dawn would light up their work — the greatest example of Britain’s greatest postwar building project, the apotheosis
