Read Victorian Architecture: A Complete History

Victorian is not a style but an era of styles, held together by an argument. Between 1837 and 1901 Britain became the first industrial nation and had to invent, at speed, the buildings industry required: the terminus, the mill, the museum, the town hall, the speculative suburb, the terraced street. It dressed them in borrowed clothes — Gothic, Italianate, Queen Anne, classical — and the borrowing was never innocent: every style was a moral claim about what the nation was. This book follows the argument from Pugin's first manifesto to the demolition gangs of the 1960s and the rescue that followed, keeping always to the buildings themselves.