For a long time Victorian architecture was misjudged because it was criticized in twentieth-century terms. Then teleology fell out of fashion and nineteenth-century buildings began to be judged, rather more sensibly, not as precedents -pioneers or anti-pioneers - but as products of their own environment. Perhaps we are now in danger of carrying this process too far. We are already starting to look at the artefacts of the Victorian age through spectacles which are rosily and uncompromisingly High Victorian. This article sets out to redress that particular imbalance by explaining the Victorian architectural scene in terms of its Regency foundations. Its terms of reference are limited. It is primarily concerned with the attitudes of early nineteenth-century architects and the way these attitudes were conditioned by economics and by education. It deals with two interconnecting themes: firstly the survival of Regency characteristics into the mid-Victorian period; and secondly the explanation offered by these characteristics for some of the primary attributes of Victorian architecture -qualities or weaknesses, according to taste.

Charles Locke Eastlake (1833–1906), an interior, furniture and industrial designer, showed talent as an architect and was awarded a Silver Medal in 1854 by the Royal Academy. He is known for influencing the style of later nineteenth-century 'Modern' Gothic furniture with his Hints on Household Taste (1868), but his passion for medieval architecture developed much earlier while he was in Europe during the 1850s. In 1866 he became Secretary to the Royal Institute of British Architects, and it was in 1872 that this work was published. The book is notable for being released at the height of the Gothic Revival movement in the later nineteenth century. It includes detailed comments on the architects, societies, literature and buildings that formed the cornerstones of the Gothic Revival, primarily in Britain, from around 1650 to 1870. A valuable mine of information, it remains a key source on the topic.

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We begin in Trinity College, Cambridge, in May 1839. It is 10 o’clock at night and three undergraduates named Neale, Webb, and Boyce are trying to persuade one of their dons, Archdeacon Thorp, to become senior member of a new society. They refuse to leave until he agrees. The Cambridge Camden Society is born. J. M. Neale becomes President, Benjamin Webb Secretary, and E.J. Boyce Treasurer. Within a year they are joined by another Trinity man with influence in a much wider sphere, Beresford Hope. By 1843 the membership list includes two archbishops, sixteen bishops, thirty-one peers and M.P.s, seven deans or chancellors of dioceses, twenty-one archdeacons or rural deans, sixteen architects, and seven hundred ordinary members. In 1845 the society goes national, moves to London, and becomes the Ecclesiological Society.

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