Pugin’s end was decidedly gothic. Driven mad by overwork as he tried to create a medieval court for the Great Exhibition (its gigantic Crystal Palace itself a kind of see-through version of Westminster’s institutional bulk, an imperial vitrine), the architect went insane in the summer of 1852, and that September, died in Bedlam. What he left behind – then unfinished – was a secular cathedral for an age of mass production; its repetitions of spires and crockets and row after row of windows which, for all their numerousness, tell nothing of what goes on inside, as if imbuing the building with the same sacred mystery as the churches from which it draws its style.

For an age moving too fast to invent its own aesthetic – or attempting to dignify its headlong progress by reference to an ancient past – gothic became the nineteenth- century style by default. By the 1870s it was suburbanised and commodified, and newspaper advertisments offered entire interiors in the Pugin taste, and John Ruskin would rail against the beast he had created even as it encroached on his south London suburb. ‘Why Mr Ruskin leaves Denmark Hill’ headlined the South London Press of 23 March 1872. ‘Frankenstein flying from monsters of his own creation is the character Mr John Ruskin declares he now personates’. Twenty years’ previously, the author of The Stones of Venice had given ‘the impetus to the revival of Gothic’; now he complained ‘I have had indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between this and Bromley, and there is scarcely a public-house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin-and-bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals…’

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