Municipal Gothic
By the middle of the nineteenth century the Gothic Revival had ceases to be a joke; the driving force behind it had changed from fashionable whimsy to an evangelical (the word is used in no narrow denominational sense) fervour. The Gothic was now regarded not merely as the most beautiful method of building but the most True; a practical demonstration of the permanent validity of Keats’ celebrated definition of aesthetic worth. It was a shrewd move on the part of the post to inform us, albeit rather tartly, that the interchangeability of Truth and Beauty “is all we need to know,” for despite the gallant efforts of Mr. Ruskin, embodied in a score of thick volumes, the precise reason why any one style of building should be Truer than another remains impenetrably obscure. The revivalists, however, were not burdened with overmuch intellectual curiosity, and taking the poet at his word forged ahead, creating for posterity a noble legacy of schools, town halls and railway termini all in the purest style of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. At first they had confined themselves largely to ecclesiastical buildings, but had soon come to the conclusion that good enough for God was good enough for Caesar and in less than no time half the public buildings in the country were enriched by a splendid abundance of crockets and gargoyles, meurtrires and encaustic tiling. (Lancaster, 1938)