When a building in the inner suburbs of a British city is scheduled for demolition, there is often a local campaign — sometimes a successful one — to save it. The language of those campaigns tends to congregate around a small number of rooms: the frontage, if it has one; the stair, if it is unusually wide; the original fireplace, if the estate agent's photographs made something of it.

What almost never comes up, in the public record of those campaigns, is the attic. I have been making a list, out of boredom, of the public enquiries and planning hearings in which an attic is mentioned at all, and the list after two years has five items on it. In none of the five is the attic defended for its own sake. In two it is described as a possibility for future conversion; in one, as a safety hazard; in two, as a site of recent water ingress.

This essay is the one I have been meaning to write for most of the winter, and which, as these things go, arrives six months late in the printed quarterly but on this site first. It is about attics, yes, but more broadly it is about the rooms that cities do not talk themselves into protecting…