Twenty years ago the Prince of Wales famously opened his attack on modern British architecture by comparing it to “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.” “Perhaps what he could not see at the time was that far from retreating into a cosy world of agreeable Georgian architecture, British architects would return to the fray with a forward-looking architecture that is, on the whole, far superior to what had gone before the carbuncle speech at Hampton Court.”