The left-leaning town planner Peter Hall and Michael Heseltine, the secretary of state for environment, were unlikely partners as together they surveyed derelict swathes of East London with a vision of their economic transformation at the beginning of the 1980s.
Hall was a slightly scruffy, unconventional figure, who had co-written a book with an anarchist; Heseltine was an impeccably coiffured patrician Conservative minister charged with reinventing Britain’s inner cities after the riots of the early 1980s. The ripples of their seismic decision-making are still being felt in the vast hinterland east of Tower Bridge, where Canary Wharf has grown into a financial powerhouse to rival the City.
Hall’s status as the key government planning adviser of the Thatcher years got off to an inauspicious start.