No book this year has provided me with such interest and visual delight as Gavin Stamp’s superb Gothic for the Steam Age: An Illustrated Biography of George Gilbert Scott (Aurum Press, £30). The Midland Hotel St Pancras, the Martyr’s Memorial in Oxford, the Albert Memorial in Kensington, the Hereford Choir Screen, Holy Trinity Rugby, where I often worshipped (eheu, now demolished), St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh — one of the finest cathedrals in the world. Stamp is the finest architectural historian of the Victorian era and his evocation of Scott — architect and human being — is a masterpiece, accompanied by superb illustrations.
It is an intensely sad book, for so many of the towns which Scott beautified have been wrecked. Imagine yourself standing in Atkinson Grimshaw’s depiction of damp twilight in ‘Park Row, Leeds,’ 1882, full of marvellous buildings (Scott’s red-brick Beckett’s Bank the most conspicuous), every one of which, as Stamp says poignantly, was demolished in the 1960s.