Former health minister Aneurin Bevan, who had helped found the NHS eight years earlier, blasted the standard of council housing on a visit to Islington Central Library in Holloway Road.

The MP said: “We shall have to pay a high price in the future for the decline in standards of new housing.

“It is so much easier to put up two bad houses instead of one-and-a-half good ones.”

Meanwhile, Islington Council took steps to clean up the borough’s filthy air.

The authority made provisions to ban dirty smoke from chimneys and new furnaces to be “smokeless as practicable”. Council leader Gwyn Jones predicted success, saying that if US city Pittsburgh had been able to do it, London ought to be able to as well.