The Telegraph points out that Victorian culture is no longer held in much esteem in the UK. Much of the era’s architecture has been razed without pity or remorse:

We are fortunate, though, that even if we find some Victorian novelists repetitive and derivative, and some poets obscure and laboured, their works are still available to evaluate, and perhaps even enjoy. It is not always true of the architecture. The benefit of being an architect is that your work commands attention even from people who do not seek it out, but who happen upon it. […] But there is a fate worse than being the near-anonymous hand behind a great building, and that is being the architect whose great building no longer survives. The Luftwaffe and what passed for taste in the post-war period wrought a 30-year holocaust on Victorian buildings. We know what Goering’s motives were; but those who wielded the demolition ball in the 1950s and 1960s had no such excuse, other than bigotry and philistinism.

Victorian painting has suffered a similar fate. Though recently there has been a resurgence which The Independent marks with this story of a couple who bought a painting for £100 half a century ago:

The bustling landscape of Salthouse Dock in Liverpool, by John Atkinson Grimshaw, has been owned by the anonymous Northumberland couple for 50 years since they bought it from a dealer in London’s Burlington Arcade.

Leeds-born Grimshaw painted it in 1892 and it has hung on the wall of the owners’ home, gaining in value as his collectability increased. It sold at the Alnwick salerooms of Jim Railton for £185,000.

Gavin Stamp exposes Britain’s vendetta against its Victorian masterpieces (Telegraph)

Pensioners’ £100 Art Buy Nets Fortune (The Independent)