CardiffWalesMap

But too often, it remains a token gesture, even a -wilful two fingers up to the conservation officer, facades left butchered and awkwardly marooned, as if to say: “You made us keep it, and just see how you like it now.”

One such battle is evident in Cardiff, in a form of facadist high farce, where the rusticated stone frontage of the Victorian New College building lies stranded at the base of a gleaming white apartment tower. It looks like a discarded husk from which the monumental shaft has sprouted, a tiny scrap of history at the bottom of the 23-storey monster.