All of which is fine and dandy, but do these buildings celebrate or hide their clip-together origins? Where's the architecture? At Murray Grove, Cartwright Pickard's origins as an office-design practice make it look, with that big corner rotunda and exterior cross-bracing, much more like an advanced office block than a stack of housing. This is is fine by Robinson, who observes: "Regeneration requires us to show some boldness in our architecture. The way you demonstrate confidence in the future is by having exciting, forward-looking buildings, not retro buildings." Simon Allford's bigger prefab exercise at Stoke Newington will certainly follow this dictum. There, unlike Murray Grove, the design does everything possible to show how the building is made, staggering the boxes as they are stacked up to create balconies, terraces, and an overall syncopated rhythm to the facades. This is by no means shrinking-violet architecture. Robinson hopes the local planners will see the regeneration message the same way he does.

The point is, we now know that the thing can be done. It works, it is fast, it results in real buildings, and the architecture is high quality. This is not so much a new experiment, as the latest stage in a continuing experiment that has, with pauses, so far lasted more than half a century. The surprise, then, is not so much that homes are being made this way at the start of the 21st century. The real shock is that they have not been made like this for years already.