Lost Victorian Britain: A Pictorial Chronicle of Destruction

Both a remarkable photographic record of a vanished landscape of 19th-century architecture, and an angry polemic against the cavalier destruction of hundreds of grand buildings, this is the latest record of magnificent buildings from previous centuries that for a variety of reasons—but above all cavalier demolition by 20th-century planners devoted to the cause of modernism—are now no more, and exist only in heartbreakingly poignant photographs. This latest chronicles an astonishing and depressing array of the finest Victorian architecture all sacrificed to the wrecking ball, from the Euston Arch to Preston Town Hall, from a great country house like Trentham in Staffordshire to a fine Victorian church like St. Jude's in London’s Red Lion Square. Here are public baths, railway termini and hotels, town houses, factories, banks, law courts—all buildings that, if threatened today, would soon see calls for restoration. But it's too late—photographs are all we have left. Gavin Stamp's indignant and scholarly text looks back at the circumstances of their loss, and analyzes the 20th-century mind set that could hold so many magnificent buildings in such little regard.