‘Within the last fifteen or twenty years, a larger field has been opened for architectural talent, than at almost any period in our modern annals; a greater number of bridges and churches, and of both public and private works, upon an extended scale, have been completed, than in a hundred years before. [However] the taste and style of some of the public edifices do not indicate such a state of improvement as might have been desired and expected from the increased opportunities which have been thus afforded.’
The above statement well expresses the general dissatisfaction with contemporary public architecture so prevalent in the periodical criticism of the late 1820s and 30s: a feeling so widespread that Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine of 1828 referred to it half-seriously as a ‘fashion’. It was a relatively recent phenomenon. In the previous decade a strong mood of optimism characterized prospective thinking about metropolitan architecture. The renewal of extensive government patronage of architecture after the Napoleonic wars, together with the profusion of privately financed major works being erected or planned, led contemporaries to envision and hope for a favourable transformation of the topography and architectural image of London.