Nick Mason pins a medal on a relic of Victorian engineering, but regrets his mispent youth as an architecture critic

My wonder is Crossness Pumping Station, designed by Joseph Bazalgette. I like it because of what it represents. There’s a lot about Victorian architecture that one might find rather distasteful – during my architecture training everyone was moving towards austere buildings, such as those by Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. But Crossness is great because it was so successful at what it did. Before the sewage system was installed, 20,000 people in London died from cholera each year.

I studied architecture at the Regent Street Poly. I had three visiting lecturers there – Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Eldred Evans; I wonder what happened to them? Actually the Foster and Rogers buildings in London are terrific, but I do remember, as a student, feeling obliged to defend appalling modern architecture — Centrepoint, for instance. It was like defending fox hunting, but without the good bits. Of course, there were many worse examples than Centrepoint lurking on street corners.

It is encouraging that the status of the architect seems to have risen since the 1960s. Perhaps Prince Charles has mellowed, or perhaps there’s less water getting in through modern glass roofs.

Nick Mason is drummer with Pink Floyd. His book, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced £30