Harry Mount

The men who demolished Victorian Britain

Gavin Stamp's Anti-Ugly and Lost Victorian Britain are a glorious lament for our lost architectural heritage - and a celebration of what remains

The London terminus of the North Western Railyway in the 1860s, showing a busy scene in front of the Euston Arch, which was demolished a century later. Credit: Universal Images Group 
issue 23 November 2013

Anyone with a passing interest in old British buildings must get angry at the horrors inflicted on our town centres over the last half-century or so. Gavin Stamp is wonderfully, amusingly, movingly angry. And he has been ever since the early 1960s when, as a boy at Dulwich College, he saw workmen hack off the stiff-leaf column capitals in the school cloisters.

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