Martin Pawley died on 9 March 2008. His great ability was to get straight to the point, which often included pointing out, invariably with great humour, that others had no point.

He exposed the pointlessness of much architectural discussion, while struggling to critically understand seemingly nebulous and apparently contradictory events and trends. Martin was good at doing that for a period of 40 years. He made criticism look easy to those who only knew him as a writer and speaker, but his clarity required the quickness of insight that comes from hard thinking, underpinned by a principled willingness to offend.

Those who couldn't take his criticism while he was alive will no doubt soon be repeating Martin's ideas as if they were their own, without proper credit. Or will spin the arguments Martin made, and misquote him, in an effort to make it look like there never was a disagreement. Or, perhaps most effective of all, those Martin criticised will never mention him again, and will persist with ideas they know privately he had discredited in public.

It was not a contradiction for someone like Martin, obviously interested in housing production, to be concerned to explain why there were obstacles to that production being industrialised. In 2008 the situation has turned desperate, and the state has to support sections of the financial sector when house price inflation, already disconnected from wages and salaries, looks like it might turn into its opposite. Under those circumstances development of an inadequate supply of new homes to be sold for two or three times more than they cost to build is politically inconsequential, and house production activity can be allowed to fall again.