Watch Peoples Palaces The Golden Age of Civic Architecture online: Episode 2 The Gothic Revival

Two men are primarily responsible for this medieval style's adoption by the Victorians. Augustus Pugin associated gothic with godliness and harmony and believed that architecture could influence morality. John Ruskin's influential book The Stones of Venice looked at the gothic architecture of the Italian renaissance mercantile republics and associated it with freedom. When Ruskin untethered gothic architecture from ecclesiastical building it went on to flourish in the hands of a generation of young, idealistic architects seeking to assert the cultural credentials of the north and exert an improving influence over the citizens of the burgeoning industrial towns.

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