In the future, when people are wondering whether they 'like' that cyclopean mass of concrete, the Hayward Gallery, or how they can endure the dictates of British Gaullism, or whether they love that faithful wing of it that is charged with cultural governance, I hope they will remember the successive anxiety, bafflement, reassurance, and ultimate aesthetic conciliation, which chased one another across their hearts in this cold spring of 1984. They should think of the sensation, as if of coming home, of the enormously affecting rediscovery, in the concrete gallery, of the beauty - itself both gigantic and delicately faithful - of English Romanesque.

LRB 19 April 1984 | PDF Download