The McConochie house, built in Cardiff for Lord Bute’s estate agent, is one of the best medium-sized stone dwellings of the High Victorian Gothic, superior in almost every way to Burges’s own house at 9 Melbury Road in London. That was built later, in 1875-80, by which time the operatic medievalism of the interiors was quite out of date (see Chapter 12). Here in the Cardiff house the tight asymmetrical composition, the excellent detailing of the handsome stonework, and a generally domestic rather than Castellated air prepared the way for Burges’s fine collegiate work in America. English architects in the sixties were capable of exploiting a wide range of different aspects of the High Victorian Gothic in almost precisely the same years. Only the size and departmentalized organization of G. G. Scott’s office, the largest of the period and more like the ‘plan-factories’ of the twentieth century (see Chapter 24), can explain how he could be nominally responsible for such a quiet, well-scaled, and advanced church as St Andrew’s, Derby, designed in 1866—some say by Micklethwaite, who was working for him at the time—and also for such a strident, complex, and over-elaborated edifice as the Midland Hotel fronting St Pancras Station. The design for this was prepared in 1865 for a competition held, curiously enough, two years after the shed had been begun by the engineers W. H. Barlow (1812-1902) and R. M. Ordish (1824-86). Such a drastic divorce of engineering and architecture could hardly be expected to produce a co-ordinated edifice, yet both aspects of St Pancras have considerable independent interest. The shed, ingeniously tied below the level of the tracks and rising, for purely coincidental technical reasons, to a flattened point of slightly ‘Gothic’ outline, has the widest span of any in the British Isles and, until the nineties, in the world. It is, therefore, a nineteenth-century spatial achievement of quantitative, if not so much of qualitative, significance. The masonry block at the front is one of the largest High Victorian Gothic structures in the world. It long had ardent admirers, and it has come to have them again, for it epitomizes almost as notably as the Albert Memorial the aspirations of Scott and his generation. The contrast to its neighbour, Lewis Cubitt’s Kings Cross Station, begun some fifteen years earlier, or even to Paddington, where the engineer Brunel and the architect Wyatt collaborated so happily, is striking. The taste of English railway authorities, as of most patrons of architecture, had been revolutionized by the general triumph of the High Victorian Gothic in the late fifties and early sixties. Yet on its completion in the mid seventies St Pancras was even more out of fashion in advanced circles than were Street’s Law Courts, the construction of which only began at that time, so rapidly did taste continue to change in the late sixties and early seventies.