All right, there is the odd lone British manufacturer delivering high-quality, prefab construction here: nascent companies such as Accent and Optima and the more established Benfield ATT, who will build your home entirely from Forestry Stewardship Council-approved timber.

But one thing is so clearly missing from so many British housebuilding firms: an intellectual commitment to design and quality. Germany had a head start here. The right to a healthy dwelling was written into the 1919 Weimar constitution. In the mid-1920s, the German planner Ernst May was building 23 separate settlements around Frankfurt and making films about modern housing. Around the same time, the architect Martin Wagner was building thousands of new, exciting homes around Berlin; working for May, the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky researched and designed the first modernist kitchen, the Frankfurt kitchen, the principles of which underscore every kitchen built since.

You can see the way that all this work has fed into the modern housing culture in Germany. In one development, in Tübingen, near Hamburg, a local trust was formed to bring residents closer to the design and construction of their homes. The result is a co-housing scheme where people are encouraged to buy their homes before they are designed, and then have a say in how they should be laid out and finished. It’s one of the most eccentric and exciting housing estates I’ve ever seen, and it knocks the spots off anything we are doing here.

The rigour of this idea, the systematic approach to the whole country’s housing stock and the intellectual value that housebuilders place on their systems and products, all betray a culture dedicated to Germany delivering the made world in as perfectly formed a way as possible: a culture based on the hallowed principles of engineering.

Engineering is a discipline that courses through the veins of every person in the country. It explains why the managing director of every German company spent eight years studying the subject and has the title of “Dr”; whereas here, our MDs all used to work in marketing or accounts and are called Bob.

Not that we are bad engineers in Britain; it’s just that British engineering is relegated these days: Rover probably once filed a patent for an astonishing levitating nuclear car that will be available sometime in the 22nd century; while Audi files 9,621 patents in developing an astonishing car you can buy right now, the A6. British engineering? Well, my British engineer father defined it as “work in progress”. German engineering? That’ll be “destruction tested, improved, perfected and in production in the Ruhr Valley”.

That’s why the Germans still have several leading global car manufacturers and we have none. It’s why they have a housebuilding market rife with competition, while we can choose between two identical Beano Homes’ Georgian Noddy houses. We may be waking up to the ideas of choice and quality, value for money and affordability, but the Germans were there first, exploring new ground and then building on it. We’re not the adventurers in the housing market. We’re the also-rans.

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