That this degree of architectural originality, presented with such bold assurance and even bombast, should within a decade or two have come to seem tasteless and actually ugly—as, indeed, it has seemed to many ever since—is not of major historical consequence. The age that achieved it rejected as tasteless and insipid the architectural production of the previous hundred years, and most notably Late Georgian work of the sort to which the Langham stood in close proximity. What _is_ of consequence is that such High Victorian buildings, even when not Gothic, possessed a vitality and a contemporaneity within their period that was very largely lacking in parallel work on the Continent, most of which in any case is a decade or more later in date. In their parvenu brashness, the Grosvenor and Langham balance the contemporary achievement of the Gothic church architects—an achievement generally more acceptable even today as it was already to highbrows and aesthetics in the sixties—without necessarily equalling it (see Chapter 10). In the English hotel boom of the early and mid sixties which these big London hotels set off, some variant of the anglicized Second Empire became the accepted type of design; indeed, a mansarded French mode continued to be used as late as the nineties[207] for such a big London hotel as the Carlton built by H. L. Florence (1843-1916) in 1897. Many heavily mansarded London hotels of the seventies and eighties are now gone or have been turned, like the earlier Westminster Palace and the Langham, to other uses—among these the former Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square of 1878-80 by H. Francis and the front block of the former Cecil in the Strand built in 1886 by Perry & Reed may at least be noted here, since they remain so conspicuous and are so exasperatingly unavailable to travellers. It is a resort hotel, however, the Cliff (now the Grand) at Scarborough in Yorkshire, built by Brodrick at the height of the boom in 1863-7, just before he retired to live in France, that remains internationally the most notable example of the type (Plate 79). And the type could be found in such remote spots as the famous ‘ghost town’ of the Comstock Lode, Virginia City, Nevada, where the large and elaborate hotel is no more, or Leadville, Colorado, where the more modest and much later Vendome Hotel, built by Senator Tabor for his ‘Baby Doe’, is still in use, as well as in big European cities such as Amsterdam, Frankfort, Brussels, and Budapest.