Modern architects have a tradition of being sniffy about the heritage industry. So it is entertaining to see them adopting the zealous language of tweed-jacket outrage when their own misunderstood masterpieces face the wrecking ball.

Today's great culture clash concerns Robin Hood Gardens, a housing estate in Poplar, East London, whose concrete “new brutalist” style echoes Sherwood Forest only in that its benighted residents feel that living there is akin to being branded outlaws.

Undaunted, architects are campaigning to save it. Allegedly, it is not the fault of the 36-year-old structure, which, in Lord Rogers of Riverside's opinion, is “as good if not better than any other modern building in Britain”, but rather that it has been lived in by those “least capable of looking after themselves, much less their environment”.

Yet it was long the argument of modernists that buildings' aesthetic merits were arbitrary - if they failed to serve their purpose, they should be torn down. In the 1960s and 1970s, the integrity of Georgian Bath was punctured by developers demolishing stone-built 18th-century terraces. Protesters were treated dismissively by the City Architect: “If you want to keep Georgian artisans' houses, then you will have to find Georgian artisans to live in them.”

Certainly, advocates of concrete architecture were not slow to ridicule those wanting to preserve Victorian buildings. Eric Lyons, a noted architect of postwar housing, was withering, labelling them “Betjemanic depressives”. John Betjeman was among those who protested in 1957 when John Nash's magisterial Georgian stucco terraces overlooking Regent's Park faced redevelopment.

“These gloomy terraces,” announced the Art News and Review, “have outlived their utility. Not only are the buildings worn out, but the aesthetic on which they are founded has outlived its day.” The esteemed modernist, Leslie Martin, head of the architecture school at Cambridge, concurred. “In the past 25 years we have developed an architecture to fit our needs, and if it is not good enough for Regent's Park, it never will be.”

The terraces were saved and are at present on the market at offers over £12 million per house. But the modernists did secure the demolition of the magnificent Euston Arch. In 1961 many failed to see the relevance of a classical portico. But one modern architect made common cause with Betjeman. The unlikely advocate for the preservation cause was Alison Smithson, later the architect, with her husband, of the Robin Hood Estate.

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