Ha ha, I can't believe you have used that hackneyed argument! Read it again,
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"the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s to clear away a lot of stuff we now rather wish we'd kept"
So you would rather the world as it was in 1950? With tenements and courts? With grinding poverty in poorly built sub-standard Victorian ruins? You cannot compare the destruction of St Johns to the mass-redevelopment of the 1960s.
Yes, mistakes were made and often buildings that could have been saved were demolished, important ones (Sailors Home - an architectual marvel, Customs House, ditto, Overhead Railway - historical as an early light railway system, Cavern- they must have been on drugs to demolish that!), but who remembers the hundreds of crap Victorian warehouses and slums they demolished? Who laments them? No-one because they were architectually and historically unimportant on their own. They were just empty relics of the past.
It is only now, when we are running out of Victorian warehouses that we must take care to preserve the important/significant ones, ditto with St Johns church. Unlike the developers in the past, modern builders have an obligation to record and preserve the facts about whatever they destroy, they are much more sensitive to local issues and I feel the fact that the tower has been saved as vindicating this fact.
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