They looked back to the great Victorian engineers, they looked forward to the manned moon mission. From the Forth Bridge to the Lunar Excursion Module, with giant airships in between. The other stuff - prissy, messing-about, up-itself architecture - they rejected as irrelevant. They liked the idea of a home you could wear like a suit, or a building made of sockets you could plug rooms into, or anything inflatable. It helped that they all came from different backgrounds, different towns and cities, different architecture schools. They were not an aesthetic clique, but a collection of boffins. They admired Barnes Wallis and the geodetic structure of his Wellington bomber. They were supremely English.

The names of their projects tell you everything. Plug In City. Walking City. Instant City. Seaside Bubbles. Living Pod. Tuned Suburb. Electronic Tomato. Cushicle. Suitaloon. They were good at titles, they were good at presentation, and they were good at soundbites. As Peter Cook, one of the original three Archigram founders, once put it: "The pre-packaged frozen lunch is more important than Palladio". Although British architecture's most beloved lateral thinker, their contemporary Cedric Price, was never an official member of the group, they had a lot in common when it came to the desirability of transience. Price described the best conventional British buildings of the time - the ones that won awards and appeared in magazines - as "just the Middle Ages with power points." Archigram offered an alternative.