Take the yellow brick road

Ever since W.S. Gilbert’s Lady Jane lamented, ‘Oh, South Kensington!’ in Patience, 1881, the place has carried a regretful quality. Owing to the extraordinary lack of confidence shown by successive governments and Treasury officials in the educational values that Prince Albert hoped to promote through the estates of the 1851 Commission, the gentle, south-facing slope of Brompton became, over the course of time, a palimpsest of build structures, not all of which deserve the title of architecture.