This is however made up for by Coventry. Its masterly Basil Spence cathedral - which is only now coming to be fully appreciated - became a national symbol of rebirth and reconciliation in the post-war years. The new cathedral, by the sublimely simple gesture of embracing the roofless ruins of the old, did much to set things to rights. Coventry has long been officially twinned with Dresden: this explains why there was such controversy when a statue of Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, responsible for the RAF’s deadly carpet-bombing raids, was erected in London in the 1990s.

Statues are useless, a wholly discredited sculptural commodity. Buildings with other uses can serve the purpose better, and they do not have to be cathedrals. Norman Foster’s American Air Museum at Duxford, for instance, is also a memorial to all those who died on the bombing and fighter missions of the air war. That maybe sets a useful precedent for non-religious memorial architecture, since - despite the example of Coventry - organized religion can hardly be said to have a good record when it comes to wars, persecution and conflict. This is why Christian iconography was downplayed in the monuments to the Great War: after the church-sanctioned slaughter, it was just not appropriate. Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and his Felix Nussbaum museum in Osnabruck, are other secular buildings acting as containers for memory. He calls it “Rooms against forgetting”.

Victims fare still worse when it comes to remembering non-wartime disasters. The small bronze plaque at London’s King’s Cross Station, brusquely recording the 31 people who died in the underground fire there, is pitifully inadequate. But at least it is sober and sombre. Other memorials - particularly any that involve the police, for some reason - veer towards kitsch.

Those that are spontaneously generated by the public are temporary, but have an extraordinary power. What I remember about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana in that Parisian car crash was the sea of plastic-wrapped flowers that swiftly enveloped a corner of Kensington Gardens. It was a giant version of those sad little cheap bunches of flowers you see tied to lampposts where a car has fatally crashed or someone has been run over, which made it absolutely appropriate for the circumstances. No official memorial could ever match that. Indeed, to judge by recent inconclusive efforts, we seem to have lost the knack of designing memorials altogether. Memorial gardens? Memorial playgrounds? Memorial jogging circuits? At least nobody proposed a memorial Mercedes showroom.