ABSTRACT
John James Stevenson established an architectural reaction to the taste for Gothic and Renaissance designs through the development of the so-called ‘Queen Anne’ style. The pre-Raphaelite school of painters have abandoned the purity and restraint with the stiffness and imperfection of Medievalism, and glory in the fullness of physical life and the richness and freedom of Classic ideas. The springing up of a taste for some form of free Classic architecture is therefore not unnatural, but was to be expected in those who had drunk deeply of Gothic. And the form of free Classic which thus arose was naturally determined by local conditions. In truth, the success of Gothic is with those who loved it one cause of this reaction. Its advocates urged that it was good not only for churches, but for every kind of building; that it ought to become again, as it had once been, the vernacular architecture of the country.
