In this lecture Alex will explore how we might interpret the modern Gothic Revival as a unique outcome not merely of industrialisation but of the carbon-based economy that drove it, suggesting an ecocritical historiography that foregrounds its environmental allusions and discontents.

Since the Renaissance, architectural writers have often conceived the subject in terms of the design and the designer  - prioritising them over the social context, the materiality of buildings, the methods of construction employed and their life in use, which usually involves physical alteration.