While the rest of the overpopulated world gets on with designing super-towers that are effectively complete city districts in themselves and thus save thousands of hectares of countryside from urban sprawl, in Britain - and especially London - we are still stuck in a 1950s timewarp. We are missing the plot comprehensively. Instead of thinking of new kinds of urban skyscraper - town-towers - which could take the pressure off our fast-disappearing countryside AND be nice places to live, work and look at, we are still arguing over a few office towers here and there. Some of which may be a bit tall.

This week, all the old arguments resurfaced. English Heritage, now once again a conservation body under Sir Neil Cossons after its eight years as perceived developer's friend under Sir Jocelyn Stevens, is uneasy, particularly about London. Along with the Government's architectural vetting agency, CABE (that's the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) English Heritage is making clucking noises and asking for informed debate.

At the same time English Heritage (but not CABE) has released poll findings purporting to show that nobody much wants tall buildings, as it happens. This is because, in reality, English Heritage and CABE have rather different views. The former is now instinctively against all towers. The latter approves of them if they are well-designed and in what is deemed to be the right place. So there is a fault line between our two guardians of the environment. But for the moment, both are singing the same song.

All this is happening at a time when many previously despised residential tower blocks - not least North Kensington's 1972 Trellick Tower by the late and splendidly named Erno Goldfinger - have been "listed" by the selfsame English Heritage. That means they have been declared architecturally and historically important, and worthy of protection. They have also become distinctly fashionable addresses. So on the one hand, towers are officially bad. On the other, they are officially good. Meanwhile, former 1960s office blocks in London and other cities continue to be tarted up and converted into loft-style apartments. They sell to an interesting mix of the affluent urban young, and even more affluent late middle-aged couples - those returning to the centre after completing their child-rearing duties out in the suburbs. What does this tell us? Why, that we should rethink our idea of what a skyscraper should be.