English Gothicism

“There was a time in the last decades of the eighteenth century

and the first half of the nineteenth century, reflected dimly in

the prints, paintings and surviving relics of that era, which eff-

ectively symbolises our deep-rooted yearning to escape from

the mindlessness of modern existence through its portal where

glimpses of a beautiful, unpolluted world with clean, graceful

architecture starkly contrasts with the smoke-discoloured ed-

ifices of concrete in today’s wilderness of ugly buildings set in

a wasteland of dying forests. … Such vistas, such colour and

the pleasure they produce are of different orders to anything

we now experience. So much so, that were we to glimpse, feel,

smell and taste how life once was (against the natural back-

ground sound of birds, brooks and horses’ hooves instead of

the cacophony of aeroplanes, industry and motor vehicles) we

would probably think ~ and indeed dream ~ differently … ”