Lost Victorian Britain: How the Twentieth Century Destroyed the Nineteenth Century's Architectural Masterpieces Book

These days it seems perfectly obvious that stupendous nineteenth-century constructions like St Pancras Station should be not only preserved from dereliction but also restored to their original iron-and-glass glory - and used. But it was not always the case. As recently as the 1970s a superb Victorian building like Glasgow's St Enoch's Hotel was being levelled to make way for a banal shopping centre. In the mid-1960s St Pancras itself had been earmarked for demolition. The prevailing attitude of the twentieth century towards Victorian architecture had, for many decades, been well summed up by P.G. Wodehouse in his dismissal of the fictional mid-Victorian Walsingford Hall as 'a celebrated eyesore in all its startling revolting hideousness'. 'Victorian', quite simply, was a term of abuse. Add in the wartime bombing of our cities by the Luftwaffe, and the vandalism of the town planners to make way for the modern ring road and the multi-story, and the scale of the damage is truly sobering. This poignant book, full of stunning and unexpected images, chronicles - and deplores - the catastrophic swathe cut through our architectural heritage by the twentieth century's sustained antipathy to the nineteenth, as well as offering an offbeat history of Victorian architecture, and its belated re-evaluation, entirely through buildings that have disappeared. Of the 200 notable examples of Victorian architecture illustrated in this book, from the magnificent Imperial Institute in Kensington to Norman Shaw's superb church in Bingley, from Preston Town Hall to the vast country house of Eaton Hall, not one still exists. A photograph is all we have left. As well as architectural causes celebres like the Euston Arch and London's Coal Exchange, Stamp also turns up many lesser-known but amazing Victorian buildings whose loss is perhaps even more to be mourned, because history gave us no time at all to appreciate them. Who'd have known that Hackney in East London briefly accommodated the extraordinary Gothic battlements of Columbia Market, or that Chatsworth in Derbyshire once boasted a soaring glasshouse streamlined like a spaceship? Complementing these plangent images is Gavin Stamp's angry account of the wilful destruction, largely motivated by ignorance and prejudice, of grand, solid, striking buildings made to last a lifetime. Surprising, chastening, but also uplifting, Lost Victorian Britain is a memorable journey back into a world we should never have lost.Read More