'It isn't ugly' - Rogers on Robin Hood Gardens

Lord Rogers has called on the government to designate a controversial brutalist housing development in London's east end as a building of special architectural interest.

Robin Hood Gardens, which was finished in 1972, has been threatened with demolition.

"The building is, without doubt, the best piece of social and architectural thinking in the last 50 years," said Lord Rogers, whose work includes the Pompidou Centre in Paris, London's Millennium Dome, Cardiff's Senedd and the European Court of Human Rights building in Strasbourg.

"We will look back on it as a major piece."

The building was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, the inventors of the New Brutalist style of the 1950s.