“Every city is more fantastical than fantasy,” Anderson is telling me. “Barcelona, Berlin, Tokyo, London – they’re more bizarre than we think.”

Anderson grew up in a terraced house in inner city Derry which overlooked a “pastiche of a Russian Orthodox roof spire” on top of St Patrick's Church in Pennyburn. “Reading Arabian Nights as a kid”, he tells me, “I continuously made the connection. It was this link to the outside world, but fantastical.”

It’s this attention to popular culture which makes Imaginary Cities so rewarding. The book traces the influence of Le Corbusier, Gericault and radical architecture group Archigram, but also Dr Caligari and Judge Dread.

“It’s accepted that an architect will be inspired by the natural world,” Anderson explains, “but there’s been some reluctance to accept the influence of ‘frivolous’ sources like cinema, comic books and the like”. This is a particularly self-defeating form of elitism, he thinks: “Architects were all kids once, and civic planners were – even politicians were once children”.

...

“The push towards regionalism and more democratic forms of architecture is a very welcome one,” Anderson says. “It does mitigate the mediocrity on the horizon. Ultimately, these are our spaces. These are where we live and breathe, where we interact with each other.”

“It shows a profound lack of imagination that every tower that goes up is a tower to commerce,” he adds. “It could be towers to music, and culture... there’s no reason we can’t dare to dream again. Where are the towers for everything else? It’s just a matter of nerve.”