Victorian Architecture: diversity and invention. By James Stevens Curl. 298mm. Pp 635, 52 col, 473 b&w ills. Reading: Spire Books, 2007. ISBN 9781904965060. £69.95 (hbk)

摘要

It is some time since there has been a major book on Victorian architecture. In this weighty and magnificently illustrated volume, Professor Curl brings together many of the subjects that he has studied throughout his professional life. He has always been interested in Victorian architecture and the subheading of this book, ‘diversity and invention’, provides the reasons: most buildings of the nineteenth century exhibit great confidence and certainty in all their many forms and these characteristics are always contrasted in the Professor’s mind with the timidity and dullness of most of the architecture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which he dislikes, reserving his especial hatred for the Modern Movement. Even though he acknowledges that ‘the rate of wholesale destruction of Victorian built fabric has slowed after the orgies of demolition, during and after the 1939–45 war’, Curl still sees the problems of neglect, inner-city decay, vandalism and political decisions which have ‘all eroded the rich legacy left to us by our Victorian forefathers’. He still feels that ‘notions of the Victorian Age in the popular mind tend to be simplistic, distorted, and wildly inaccurate’. So he considers the situation better, but still not good enough, and this book is more propaganda – an appeal to his readers to use their eyes and to save what is left – than a straightforward historical textbook for students.