James Stevens Curl, our foremost architectural historian … has now produced a very substantial volume, running to some 550 pages, which is designed to make us aware of what devastating damage was done to the built environment in the years between the Wars and immediately after the Second World War.

It has all the punch and immediacy of the best of campaigning eighteenth century pamphlets and at the same time is an intellectually forceful work of scholarship. It is a lament for lost opportunities and a coruscating denunciation of what Stevens Curl considers a cult of ugliness which has defaced so many great towns and cities, not least in the United Kingdom, during the last century.

He proclaims that it is not a history of Modernism – which he defines as an architecture from which all ornament, historical allusion and the traditional has been expunged.