Travels in South Kensington: With Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture in England

The premise is wonderfully counterintuitive: why travel the world when the world's treasures await in London's museums? This is the argument Professor Omnium makes to the narrator in Conway's delightful opening gambit, setting up a book that argues the case for staying put. The South Kensington Museum becomes a portal to everywhere, a cabinet of wonders where genuine masterpieces from civilizations across the globe require no costly passport. Conway wanders its galleries with the keen eye of a man who understands that objects speak, that decorative art carries the heartbeat of the cultures that made it. But this is more than a museum guide. It's a meditation on English architecture and the question of how buildings should speak to their times. Conway examines the new municipal structures rising across England, the town halls and court-houses by architects like Mr. Waterhouse, and asks whether modern buildings can possess the honest character of the cathedrals and castles that came before. His prose moves between the particular (a snail and frog carved in granite, small sculptures with mysterious purpose) and the sweeping (the evolution of Gothic, the duties of art to society).