electricity promised thrilling liberation from bourgeois domestic oppression, with knoedls and schnitzels to go. The car still astonishes and the kitchen makes sense.

Each is evidence of that defining characteristic of Modernism: artists and designers used the products of industry as the means of expression, abandoning garret and studio for factory floor and building site. There are other treasures too: Mies van der Rohe's wistful drawings of skyscrapers when no such thing existed in Europe; Le Corbusier's original furniture designs, inspired by Πplanes, but with residual links to French luxury. Modernism is a magnificent experience: the optimism, novelty, bravery and morality of the pioneers who used calipers and pop rivets instead of palettes and brushes is inspiring. But it is elegiac too.

By 1978, anyone living in local authority housing near the Westway in London was having a profoundly unsettling Modern experience, what with all the traffic, the concrete and the telly, the MFI kitchen and those £26 Bauhaus chairs from Habitat.