The most considerable English public monument built just after the mid century, the Leeds Town Hall of 1855-9, is by Cuthbert Brodrick (Plate 78A). That Brodrick was an architect markedly French in his leanings has already been noted in describing his Leeds Corn Exchange, which is later in date but earlier in style than his Town Hall (see Chapter 4). But this major early work, for which Brodrick won the commission in a competition in 1853, is not easily pigeon-holed stylistically. The great hall inside derives quite directly from Elmes’s in Liverpool, designed almost a quarter of a century earlier, though not opened until 1856. The exterior recalls in its grandiose scale the English Baroque of Vanbrugh more than it does anything that had even been projected since the megalomaniac French projects of the 1790s. The Leeds Town Hall is certainly no longer Romantic Classical, no longer Early Victorian; yet except for the rather clumsy originality of some of the detail and the varied outline of the tower—a late emendation of the original project of 1853—it is hard to say how or why it is so definitely High Victorian, and rather a masterpiece of the High Victorian at that. Wallot in Berlin in the eighties approached Brodrick’s mode of design in the Reichstag but had little of his command of scale or his almost Romantic Classical control of mass. When Brodrick designed his town hall very little was known in England of Visconti’s project of 1852 for the New Louvre, and Lefuel had not yet begun to elaborate the design. So vigorously individual an architect as Brodrick was hardly likely, moreover, to find inspiration in the Hope house of Dusillion or the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel. But the wave of Second Empire influence arrived in England well before the Leeds Town Hall was finished. When the English swarmed to Paris to visit the International Exhibition of 1855 the character of the New Louvre became generally known to architects and to the interested public. The Crimean War in the mid fifties served, moreover, to bring English and French officialdom into close contact. To English ministers and civil servants, even more than to architects and ordinary citizens, the existing governmental accommodations in Whitehall contrasted most unfavourably with those Napoleon III was providing in the New Louvre. When a competition was held in 1856-7 for a new Foreign Office and a new War Office to be built in Whitehall, it is not surprising that most of those entrants who were not convinced Gothicists should have modelled their projects more or less on the work of Visconti and Lefuel.