As Meades has written, this trinity of afflictions – supreme delusion, tertiary syphilis and the liberal use of opium – evidently combined to make High (magic toadstools?) Victorian medievalism glorious.
Crowning a TV week of Dickens and Dibnah, Meades did not spare Sunday evening viewers ultra-obvious, sometimes tasteless and often shocking cues to illustrate his thesis on Victorian schizophrenia. The musical backdrop of Onward Christian Soldiers, knee-tremblers under viaducts and strains of Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit peppered the screens between shots of some of the weirdest and most beautiful 19th-century architecture within these shores.
Point taken. Catholic architectural convert Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin's aesthetics were indeed dressed up in moral garb; functionalist engineers lived in gingerbread houses; and Victoria's industrial magnates built big and gothic with plenty of "Go!", spurred on by child prostitution and opium addiction.
To be fair, Meades, master of the scripted one-liner, crammed several memorable thoughts into this action-packed special. There was enough to both please and anger the Vic Soc folks down in Bedford Park, London W4. The Victorians' romantic gothic leanings here were termed "the Age of Steam and Chivalry". Utopian socialist William Morris wanted "to save the world … with wallpaper". We learned that William Butterfield's Keble College, Oxford, was founded on profits of the guano trade; that the pre-Raphaelites were tragic hippies who OD'd too young; and that CR Ashbee's father was a pornographer.
The programme featured shots of Victorian building favourites, although many remained unannounced and anonymous throughout. Architectonic nerds will have spotted Pugin's incomparable St Giles in Cheadle, Staffordshire; a couple of Teulon's bloody-minded eccentricities; Burges' mind-blowing interiors at Cardiff Castle and Sir GG Scott's much-filmed staircase from St Pancras Chambers. Scott's re-editing of Lichfield cathedral west front also doubled for the attack on ecclesiological restoration, although other churches might have been a more telling choice for the before-and-afters.
For me, Meades’ few messages tended to get lost in his song: too much postmodern claptrap congealed around over-burdening gimmickry
In passing, pot shots were taken at "spurious [baronial] Scottishness" and "the Anglian creation of Welshness", although I sensed Meades has a soft spot for the modest classicism of the latter's village chapel architecture. How sad that we now suffer a surfeit of their empty carcasses.
Still, Meades loved the arts and crafts phase, "twee fiction built beautifully", and thought young Lutyens the best English architect since Vanburgh. Too bad the work of Voysey, Mackmurdo et al was so crudely copied in suburban "bogus rusticity" – the bane of England's 20th century, Meades contended.
For me, Meades' few messages tended to get lost in his song: too much postmodern claptrap congealed around over-burdening gimmickry, itself a reaction to previous genteel litanies on buildings to the accompaniment of piped Vivaldi. Yet, despite this, Meades did show that the civilising Victorian architectural legacy is still all around us in well-built urban infrastructure, street names, parks and places.
The industrial and commercial energy of Victoria's reign, its technological innovation and exploitation that led inevitably to radical social and political changes, these were forces that generated the greatest needs for building this country has ever seen. That the Victorians achieved so much in so short a time and in such a visually interesting way is a lasting testament to their willpower, financial acuity, design skills, technology and craftsmanship. Their few remaining buildings, on the whole, are "loose fit, long life" structures that can still provide us with more than adequate shelter for the 21st century.
Postscript
John Fidler is head of building conservation and research at English Heritage. Victoria Died in 1901 and Is Still Alive Today, part of BBC2's Victorian Week series, presented by Jonathan Meades.
