Brighton and Hove has some of Britain’s finest buildings in the city centre and along the seafront.

There is the incomparable Royal Pavilion and an unrivalled collection of grand Victorian churches. On the seafront there are the great Regency squares and terraces.

Brighton boasted the first pleasure pier and followed that up with the magnificent West Pier. It built the country’s largest aquarium and followed that with the half-mile long Madeira Drive terraces.

Adventurous architecture continued well into the last century with the modernist Embassy Court and some fine Art Deco offices in North Street.

But since then there has been little of note and it is hard to make much of a claim for any buildings since the Second World War.

Brighton Square in the Lanes received a Civic Trust award in the 1960s but few would defend it now. The Royal Fine Art Commission inexplicably praised the King’s West building’s austere and windowless façade.

Hove Town Hall was an interesting exercise in uncompromising design – what might be called "starkitecture" – although the city council is doing its best to minimise the impact with unsuitable extensions.

The Jubilee library has its adherents but I find it disappointingly bland and boring. Some critics like the curves of Brighton’s art college but I do not.

At least these buildings make some contribution to the street scene. That’s more than can be said for any of the city’s tower blocks.

Sussex Heights, tallest of them all, is the wrong building in the wrong place. The Albion Street towers spoil some view of the Royal Pavilion and are uncomfortable neighbours for the terraces of Hanover.

In Hove, blocks of flats utterly devoid of architectural merit were built in Kingsway, The Drive and New Church Road. They should never have been approved.

There are still some sites where great new buildings could be placed. One is Black Rock, once home to a handsome open-air swimming pool.

This site has been earmarked for a new conference centre. It will be hard to disguise the box-like halls but it should be possible using varying heights of the site and neighbouring cliffs.

Next door the marina includes a veritable hotchpotch of buildings, few of them appealing. But the development now taking place should start to bring architectural coherence and unity to the site.

After it has been completed, it will be time to tackle the undistinguished Asda superstore and its awful car park while also resigning the remarkably ugly road access to the harbour.

But the biggest opportunity is at the King Alfred site in Hove. The original building is a poor example of 1930s design and its loss would not be lamented. The 1982 swimming pool does not match it at all and has been inelegantly squeezed on to the site.

Frank Gehry’s scheme for new housing on much of the land found favour with many councillors but not the financiers a decade ago. It was too congested but it was exciting and original. Now new plans have been unveiled for the site and there was a collective groan of disappointment.

The design was drab and pedestrian. There was scarcely a spark of ingenuity in it and it failed to make use of the fine open marine frontage.

Surely Brighton and Hove can do something better than that. The architects should go back to their drawing boards and come back with something bolder and more beautiful.

We have waited far too long for impressive and imaginative buildings reflecting the spirit of the times as much as the pavilion and the piers did long ago.

Forecasters often make their names by predicting memorable spells of weather such as the great freeze of 1963 or the blazing summer of 1976.

So it was with some interest last September that I read several predictions that the forthcoming winter would be both long and hard.

Amateurs with their strands of seaweed and professionals with past patterns and powerful computers were almost unanimous in singling out February for the biggest freeze of all.

But we are now well into February and there has been barely a frost. Daffodils have come up in my allotment earlier than ever and birds are singing as if it were spring. The winter has been remarkable but for warm, windy, wet weather.

Short term forecasting is better than it has ever been with the Met Office being spot on with events such as Monday’s exceptionally high winds.

But When it comes to looking ahead, the professionals are no better than anybody else in getting forecasts right. The only sure long-term prediction is our weather will remain gloriously unpredictable.