Ugly?

Many of you may know Wilfrid Blunt's marvelous little book The Haileybury Buildings. It is now long out of print but Amazon may throw up a copy.

He describes the Chapel as follows, suggesting that the best word to use would be "Romanesque."

"It is usually referred to as Byzantine; this is, however, wrong. The exterior comes nearer to the Romanesque than to any other known style, and in particular to the north Italian or Lombardic Romanesque. The general external form of the building appears to be a Lombardic version of the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione at Todi, while the dome resembles fairly closely that of Duomo nuovo at Brescia. Into the interior more of the Renaissance had crept; the capitals were Corinthian and composite (though the bases were Ionic), the general decoration was geometrical, the general impression unspeakable." 

That was of course before the redecoration took place!

Blunt's book on the Haileybury Buildings could be updated now if we had someone who combined his precision of description, deep knowledge of architecture and acerbic  wit. He finishes his remarks on Blomfield's chapel by saying: "It is sometimes assumed that architectural ugliness is usually the result of economy. This is fallacious. It generally takes quite a lot of money to make a building really ugly, as the Chapel showed."

I hope he would be kind to the new Modern Languages building, but what he would have said of the Sports Hall and - even more - of the Tennis Academy is probably best left unconsidered!