While bombs did some damage, they did nothing compared with a disastrous postwar planner, Rowland Nicholas, who sought to demolish much of the city – even the town hall – to rebuild a socialist utopia.
Hartley's idea is that his island is a kind of utopia, a place where observers can think about what nations could or should be.
We will feel it in the strength of our relationships – the civility and courtesy we show to each other … And we will feel it in our culture – a new can-do and should-do attitude where Britons once again feel in control of their lives…" That promised utopia has, as the life stories behind Britain Uncovered survey begin to suggest, got off to a fairly sluggish start.
In Lenin's very last writings, long after he renounced the utopia of State and Revolution, he explored the idea of a modest, "realistic" project for Bolshevism.
The real damage to Le Corbusier's reputation comes not just from the forensic evidence produced by the two authors, but with the hindsight that a fascist aesthetic obviously informs his designs – from this point of view, what was meant to be utopia now looks like an exercise in dehumanising brutalism.
"It was a utopia of sorts," Eve, a friend who grew up in Canberra, tells me.
He boldly says the word socialism and sarcastically says the word utopia.
"The government in the movie limits every aspect of life — where to live, what to wear, what to eat, who to marry — to make a society that doesn't have pain or risk, supposedly, to create some kind of utopia.
Fast forward 20 years and Public Enemy's revolution has come true, realised not as a Marxist utopia, but as a business model for modern corporate America: moguls such as Jay-Z, P Diddy and Damon Dash own everything from the music to the merchandise, the tour, the clothing range and the drink you buy in the interval.
For Milton Keynes residents, this vision of motoring utopia could soon become reality, after the council signed a contract with BT to install a public network for "the internet of things" – the idea of linking smartphones to household hardware such as washing machines and heating, and now car park spaces.
But his very best was for Sainsbury's and Volvo, twin foundations of Britain's late-20th-century suburban utopia.
