Architecture and Social Reform in Victorian London

This text examines the architecture of the newly-emergent institutions of reform and philanthropy in late Victorian London. The author analyzes the relationship between the intentions of the founders and the architectural expression of their buildings.

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This book examines the architecture of the newly-emergent institutions of reform and philanthropy in late Victorian London that were intended to bring the redemptive values of English middle-class culture to the working-classes. Amidst the sea of squalid brick tenements and working-class two-up, two-down houses of late 19th-century London, new building types arose, large in scale and bold in their message: the triple-storied Queen Anne board schools, the mock Elizabethan settlement houses, an Arts and Crafts free public art gallery replete with mystic symbolism and, as first conceived, a neo-Byzantine pleasure-palace for the working-classes. Weiner explains the social relations which informed the production and use of these buildings, analyzing the relationship between the intentions of the founders and the architectural expression of their buildings, which drew upon contemporary myths of a peaceful and harmonious past.