These days it seems perfectly obvious that stupendous nineteenth-century constructions like St Pancras Station should be not only preserved from dereliction but also restored to their original iron-and-glass glory - and used. But it was not always the case. As recently as the 1970s a superb Victorian building like Glasgow's St Enoch's Hotel was being levelled to make way for a banal shopping centre. In the mid-1960s St Pancras itself had been earmarked for demolition. The prevailing attitude of the twentieth century towards Victorian architecture had, for many decades, been well summed up by P.G. Wodehouse in his dismissal of the fictional mid-Victorian Walsingford Hall as 'a celebrated eyesore in all its startling revolting hideousness'. 'Victorian', quite simply, was a term of abuse. Add in the wartime bombing of our cities by the Luftwaffe, and the vandalism of the town planners to make way for the modern ring road and the multi-story, and the scale of the damage is truly sobering. This poignant book, full of stunning and unexpected images, chronicles - and deplores - the catastrophic swathe cut through our architectural heritage by the twentieth century's sustained antipathy to the nineteenth, as well as offering an offbeat history of Victorian architecture, and its belated re-evaluation, entirely through buildings that have disappeared.