By 1853 the craze for iron construction was so great that the Ecclesiological Society, forgetting their Puginian principles—Pugin had died the previous year, but not before issuing a severe critique of the metal-and-glass construction of the Crystal Palace—commissioned their favourite and most ‘correct’ architect, Carpenter, to design for them an iron church. It was not Carpenter’s death two years later but the refusal of the English bishops to consecrate prefabricated structures for permanent use that brought to nothing this interesting project along the lines of Rickman’s and Cragg’s Liverpool churches of forty years earlier. The general flood of prefabrication, now producing all sorts of structures for the Antipodes and other remote areas that still lacked their own building industries, slowed down in 1854, when the demands of the War Office for barracks (on account of the Crimean War) deflected prefabricators from civil production. In that year, however, Sydney Smirke began one of the last major monuments of cast iron in England, the domed Reading Room in the court of his brother’s British Museum. Awkward in proportion and encased in stacks, this is not to be compared in distinction of design with the Reading Room that Henri Labrouste added to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1862-8[175] (Plate 69). That superb interior, with its many light domes of terracotta carried on the slenderest of metal columns and arches, is a great advance over his earlier Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (Figure 14). The Reading Room in Paris has no proper exterior, however, any more than does that in London, for it is incorporated in a group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century structures that Labrouste adapted and enlarged (see Chapter 8). Even more striking are Labrouste’s stacks, visible from the Reading Room through a great glass wall, for in them the entire spatial volume is articulated by vertical and horizontal metal elements in a fashion somewhat like the interior of the Crystal Palace. But in the sixties such things were exceptional. In 1853-8 L.-P. Baltard’s son Victor (1805-74) built the Central Markets[176] of Paris with the assistance of F.-E. Callet (1791-1854) in a mode much less elegant but still franker, exposing his metal structure outside as well as in, at Napoleon III’s personal insistence. Saint-Eugène, an almost completely iron-built church of Gothic design, was erected in Paris in 1854-5 by L.-A. Boileau (1812-96).[177] Boileau’s Saint-Paul at Montluçon, Allier, completed in 1863, is a second French example of a cast-iron church, and he made designs for several others. His Notre-Dame-de-France off Leicester Square in London, a modest church of 1868, has been completely rebuilt since the last war.