Buildings do a better job of surviving than people, sometimes by thousands of years. Indeed, we regard a building as a failure if it does not outlive the people who built it. There’s a joke in the architectural profession about the ‘Rubble Club’, which comprises architects who have lived to see their buildings torn down. Membership of this club is not envied. 

The most difficult test a building must face is the judgement of the sons and daughters of the generation that built it. As Simon Jenkins shows in A Short History of British Architecture, there is no neat and coherent tale to be told of a national style evolving or of the passing of a torch down the eras. Wren said that architecture ‘ought to have the attribute of the eternal, and therefore [be] the only thing incapable of new fashions’. Even he knew that this was a forlorn hope. Architectural taste is not a familial conversation but a bitter argument on a seesaw of opinion.

Jenkins has an eye for the entertaining squabbles architecture can provoke and his book is filled with examples. Inigo Jones, founding father of English neoclassicism, held Elizabethan buildings ‘in open contempt. He described them as “Monstrous Babels of our Moderne Barbarisme”.’ Voltaire declared John Vanbrugh’s Baroque Blenheim Palace ‘a great