Sixty years ago, Edwardian Baroque was the style you didn’t mention, especially to architecture students. It was the shocking and disreputable old great-uncle who had been written out of the family history. Pevsner, in the Outline of European Architecture, made one fleeting reference to ‘pompous Edwardian Imperial’. Robert Furneaux Jordan, in his polemical book on Victorian architecture, ignored it completely. When the Pelican ‘A History of English Architecture’, the standard student text for many years, was revised in 1965 to include Victorian and twentieth century architecture, Paul Thompson’s chapter vaulted straight from Barry’s Halifax Town Hall to C.F.A. Voysey. It was a shameful episode, best ignored.

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