Quietly, without fuss, Victorian engineers and architects also learnt how to create deep and attractive buildings with glass façades to let in the light. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner thought that these were the “path” to modernism. He was wrong: they are too playful.
Best known are Liverpool’s Oriel Chambers and the interior of Oxford’s University Museum. However, Glasgow, the “second city of Empire,” has the loveliest: 36 Jamaica Street is good. But I admire most the so-called Ca d’Oro Building, forging Venetian cornices, friezes and diamond shapes in cast iron. A modern planning officer or architectural historian would have a heart attack at the mix of old patterns and new materials. But what do they know? The Victorians just did things and lacked our paralysing fear of buildings with ornament.
Nicholas Boys Smith is founder and chairman of Create Streets and a visiting professor of architecture at the University of Strathclyde.