Ghastly Good Taste by John Betjeman

Most famous for his poetry, John Betjeman was also passionate about architecture, ‘preferring all centuries to my own’. In his first prose work, Ghastly Good Taste (1933), he vigorously defends his love of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, considered deeply unfashionable at the time. With the savage humour of his famous satire ‘Slough’, he attacks notions of Modernism and (at the other extreme) unthinking antiquarianism.