This book offers a challenge. John Stewart, a retired architect now an architectural historian, encourages us when we walk the city streets to raise our eyes to parapet level and open our minds to the incredible ornamental detail and range of symbols that bedeck major public and institutional buildings. 

The work of the architectural sculptor is, as Stewart argues strongly and illustrates persuasively, long overdue reappraisal. It is telling that the names and careers of the architects in this book are mostly familiar, while those of their industrious artisan colleagues remain obscure. On its rebuilding, the Palace of Westminster could hardly have been more intensively decorated. The new building’s architect, Charles Barry, appointed John Thomas ‘superintendent of stone carving’ in 1846. It took several hundred stonemasons to produce the ‘carved sceptres, labels, badges, shields, coats of arms, inscriptions, bosses, angels, lions, griffins’ and much else for the palatial new Houses of Parliament. 

In Leeds, where Cuthbert Broderick’s splendidly assertive town hall rose in the 1850s, the team of stonemasons and sculptors extended to Robert Mawer and his wife, Catherine, who slipped in a self-portrait, carved as a keystone, alongside representations of the mayor and the architect. This is, among much else,