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Books

Mighty monuments — or neo-Gothic horrors?

Gavin Stamp returns to the subject of George Gilbert Scott, architect of the Albert Memorial, St Pancras and plenty more pinnacled Victorian extravaganzas

26 September 2015

8:00 AM

26 September 2015

8:00 AM

Gothic for the Steam Age: An Illustrated Biography of George Gilbert Scott Gavin Stamp

Aurum Press, pp.208, £30, ISBN: 9781781311240

Briefing his illustrator for the jacket of A Handful of Dust (1934), Evelyn Waugh asked for a country house in ‘the worst possible 1860’. The result was a neoGothic extravaganza with a pinnacled entrance tower and spiky dormer windows — just the sort of thing that might have come from the drawing board of George Gilbert Scott, the most eminent architect of that time.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £27 Tel: 08430 600033. Simon Bradley’s  The Railways: Nation, Network and People was reviewed in The Spectator last week.

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