You can tell what a nation thinks of itself by looking at its buildings.
England’s commercial temples of the Eighties and Nineties spoke of a country that felt a new self-confidence after decades of perceived decline, while the buildings of the Sixties and Seventies embodied a cheapness, bleakness and disregard for aesthetics that amplified the sense of the country’s waning fortunes. A century earlier the Victorians built mightily.
Although the leading Gothic revivalists in architecture – among them Sir George Gilbert Scott, George Edmund Street and Alfred Waterhouse – had by the 1870s seen their taste prevail in many public building projects, this was not achieved without a fight.
The so-called “battle of the styles”, between the Gothic revivalists and those who were more inspired by Italianate classicism, raged throughout the 1850s and 1860s.
The struggle was made manifest when Scott was forced to design the new Foreign Office building in Whitehall in the Italianate style, despite his determination to put up a Gothic structure.
If you want to see how his original vision would have turned out, pay a visit to the Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station in London, perhaps our greatest Gothic revival building, for that is where his rejected plans ended up.
Classicism was not, however, dead: it was merely resting. It returned in the form of Edwardian Baroque – or “renaissance” style – which became fashionable shortly before Edward VII ascended the throne in 1901, and lasted up to the Great War.
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Most of our major cities, but notably London, are littered with its stone palaces. They are marked out not just by their sheer scale, but also by their ornamentation.
Windows have heavy pediments, doors have elaborate arches, and the upper levels of the buildings are often colonnaded. The roofs tend to be a riot of towers, domes and other extravagances. It is an architecture fit for the world’s greatest power.
The Port of Liverpool Building and the Albert Hall in Manchester are examples of the style in the provinces, but Edwardian Baroque was principally used to project the grandeur of London.
Its architects were assisted by the invention of steel-framed building, first seen in the extension to the Savoy Hotel (1903-04), and then in César Ritz’s palatial hotel on Piccadilly, an astonishing structure that opened in 1906, and which showed that classical influences could be French as well as Italian.
The Ritz was built by the man behind its counterpart in Paris, Charles Mewès, who collaborated with a British architect, Arthur Davis.
The employment of a Frenchman showed that, after decades in which architecture in Britain had been dominated by natives, the country was becoming increasingly susceptible to external influences.
Norman Shaw, once a devotee of the Arts and Crafts movement, then built a spectacular Italianate hotel at the other end of Piccadilly. Meanwhile, renaissance buildings began to transform the look of the rest of central London.
Commercial institutions in the City, especially around Moorgate and Finsbury Circus, built vast Baroque palaces to proclaim their wealth and solidity.
A boom in theatre-building peppered the West End with fine new venues, though the lavish renaissance influence is often more obvious inside than out. And huge steel-framed department stores appeared in Oxford Street: Selfridges is the most renowned, but there are others along its length that are often missed by pedestrians who only see the garish 21st-century shop windows.
Raise your eyes to the sky and you will see Edwardian splendour where you least expect it. But Edwardian Baroque was also a valuable instrument of the British state, flexing its muscles through the use of architecture.
The old War Office building in Whitehall, built between 1901 and 1906, is one of the most spectacular examples of this; but round the corner is perhaps the most famous, Admiralty Arch, designed by Sir Aston Webb.
It was a true representation of the Edwardian cast of mind, when Britannia really did rule the waves. And, like all architecture, it speaks to us still of the people who conceived it, and of their idea of themselves, more eloquently than words ever could.