The Geological Museum in Piccadilly in London, built in the late forties by Pennethorne, Nash’s protégé and his successor at the Office of Works, was far more successful than the ballroom wing he added in the early fifties to Buckingham Palace. Even that, however, was a considerable improvement on the curious façade—more Neo-Baroque than Neo-Renaissance—with which Edward Blore (1787-1879) masked the front of Nash’s edifice in 1847. The Museum was more successful precisely because its exteriors retained the regularity and severity characteristic of Romantic Classicism. Still later, the Free Trade Hall built by Edward Walters (1808-72) in Manchester in 1853-6 followed the lusher Sansovinesque Italianism of Smirke’s Carlton Club, while his many handsome warehouses there moved ever farther away from the severity of Barry’s Athenaeum despite their generic _palazzo_ character. Yet the Corn Exchange in Leeds, erected as late as 1860 by Cuthbert Brodrick (1825-1905), is still Romantic Classical in the cool regularity of its diamond-rusticated walls broken only by ranges of plain arches (Plate 37B). There can be little question, however, that his Town Hall in Leeds of 1855-9, despite the reiterative grandeur of its giant colonnades and the evident derivation of its principal interior from St George’s Hall in Liverpool, is in English terms definitely ‘High Victorian’ (Plate 78A). If the Corn Exchange can hardly be considered typically Early Victorian in character, and in any case is some ten years too late in date, it might almost be called _Louis Philippe_, so close is it to some French work of the 40s. Run-of-the-mill English railway stations of the forties, mostly designed by engineers and minor architects, clearly rank in their dullness with the most utilitarian French work of that decade. They indicate to what depths of conventionality late Romantic Classicism in England had sunk by this time. Yet Lewis Cubitt’s long-demolished Bricklayers’ Arms Station in London of 1842-4, with its entrance screen compounded of rustic Italian elements derived from the books of Charles Parker,[81] seems to have had considerable plastic interest. Moreover, the great plain arches at the front of his King’s Cross Station of 1850-2 (Plate 66A) remain to signalize to every traveller a masterpiece of the period more than worthy of comparison with Duquesney’s somewhat earlier Gare de l’Est in Paris (Plate 22B).