Lord Rogers, who resides in a splendid Georgian house overlooking the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, home of the Chelsea Flower Show, told the Today Programme he would be happy to live in one of Britain’s ugliest council estates which he was trying to save from demolition.

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Needless to say, invitations to come and stay by residents of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, east London went unanswered. And last week His Lordship and fellow architectural grandees, who tried very hard to get the concrete eyesore listed to save it from imminent demolition, lost.

So a setback for Lords Richard Rogers and Norman Foster (who lives in a Swiss chateau), Zaha Hadid (who lives in gentrified Clerkenwell), Rafael Viñoly (who lives in New York) and RIBA president Stephen Hodder (who lives in Manchester).  But joy for the resident, who can’t wait to move out having spent year complaining about leaky windows, random power and water supply cuts, asbestos, dirty lifts and no security.

“I’m embarrassed to say that I live here and to invite my friends to my home because it’s so disgusting and there is such a stigma attached to living here,” was a typical verdict.

Oh, the irony. Robin Hood and his merry men were famous for robbing the rich to give to the poor. Labour peer Richard Rogers and his precious followers are content to trap hundreds of families in monstrous surrounding so that he and they can continue to celebrate “a Brutalist masterpiece” and what he described as “the best piece of social and architectural thinking in the last 50 years”.

Which doesn’t say much for Rogers’s own One Hyde Park, where 80 apartments stand empty, having been sold for tens of millions apiece to non-resident offshore companies.

Robin Hood Gardens was designed by Peter and Alison Smithson, the architectural equivalent of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. As hardline social ideologues they promoted the now-discredited “streets in the sky” concept, based on the utopian idea that people can be “socially engineered” to become good neighbours because the architects decided they must.

As we know, estates of this kind became prone to crime and vandalism, as culprits used the long deckways to race away and resident increasingly required metal door railings to protect themselves from opportunistic burglars. Across the country most of these concrete edifices have been demolished or are planned for demolition.

Veteran local MP Jim Fitzpatrick, reflected his constituents’ views when he said the estate’s historical significance was “nonsense”and that the estate was “well past its demolition date, and should be brought down ASAP.”

In spite of its flirtation with post-war concrete structures, even Historic England could not be persuaded to recommend listing. It damned the building with small praise in its commentary: “The building has some interesting qualities, such as the landscape, but the architecture is bleak in many areas, particularly in communal spaces.”

So three cheers for the Culture Department for resisting the starchitectural siren calls and declining to list. Whatever replaces Robin Hood Gardens – with the possible exception of Sheriff of Nottingham Garters – can only be an improvement.