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lawless place, a horrific vision of humanity’s future lit by the guttering flames of coal gas: teeming, impoverished, disease-ridden millions crammed into a place of crime and death.

Until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, the life expectancy of those in urban areas was vastly lower than that of country-dwellers. Cities were very fertile breeding grounds for disease. But they were just as welcoming to business and industry as they were to bacteria. So people were drawn to the cities to get jobs, and went in the knowledge that they might consequently die. The commercial draw of the capital more than compensated for the deaths it caused, so London’s population rose despite them. It was a bath with the plug out that was nevertheless filling up.

We rightly associate Victorian times with that sort of chaotic urban squalor. But we should also credit the people of that era with solving the problem. In the middle of the century, everything seemed to be getting worse: larger, more crowded, more inhabited yet less inhabitable. And, basically, they sorted it out. With sewers, epidemiology and schools. They coped with London’s uncontrollable growth and they found magnificence in it. They taught the world that urban living could work; they showed it how. Frightening though the giant city must still have seemed – much more so than even my Cagney and Lacey-inspired vision of 1980s New York – Holmes, or rather Conan Doyle, spotted that by the 1890s things were moving decisively in the right direction and celebrated the fact.

However irrelevant, discredited or penurious Britain becomes, London will always have been the first modern city, the place where the method of life now favoured by most of mankind was devised. And the Victorian schools, the old board schools, are a symbol of that – a symbol of hope and pragmatism delivered in brick. It’s inspiring that there are so many of them and that lots of them are still schools. (I get a bit depressed when I see one that’s been converted into flats.) That’s why I’m so proud to live here. London, more than any other city on earth, is the new Rome – so much so that Rome is in some ways just the old London.

So I make an exception for primary schools in Victorian buildings but, in general, I view them with distaste.

It’s just a feeling. I don’t want anything to be done about it. I know we need to have primary schools. I know some of them will have to be in modern buildings and that, broadly, that’s a good sign as it suggests that money is being invested in education. So I’m not against this school I’m walking past, any more than I’m against sewage plants. And by making that comparison, I don’t mean to liken children to sewage. But, as with a sewage plant, when I pass a primary school I acknowledge that it’s an important facility without being particularly pleased to see it.

I wonder why. Is it because, despite the jolly colourful classrooms, the evidence of fun projects and well-motivated teachers, we all know what they really are: the means by which we introduce infants to the idea that their time is no longer their own? For your whole life, primary school is teaching them, you will have to go somewhere every day and obey other people’s instructions. Today, painting or nature table, to lure you in. In twenty years’ time: the company accounts, a Cornish pasty production line or an OHP presentation on ‘Corporate Goals Going Forward’.

Or is it just because I hated primary school? I absolutely did. At the age of four I started to attend Napier House, the primary day school section of Headington School, a private girls’ school in Oxford. They took boys only until they were six. Up to that age, they must have been convinced, there was little or no chance of a boy instigating any sort of sex incident. So, whether I’d have gone sex-crazy at eight if I hadn’t been segregated from the girls for their own safety, we’ll never know.

Now, this place wasn’t Dotheboys Hall. The staff were probably trying their best. I’m sure many, if not most, of my contemporaries were perfectly happy. Also, the place improved markedly in the five years between my leaving and my brother starting there, because Dan seemed to have a very happy time and he’s just as neurotic as I am. So, you know, perhaps it was a lovely school.

That said,