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Arts feature

The buildings we knocked down in the name of ‘progress’

2 June 2018

9:00 AM

2 June 2018

9:00 AM

When the German novelist Sophie von La Roche visited Oxford Street in the 1780s she saw watchmakers and fan shops, silversmiths and spirit booths, and a Pantheon that rivalled the one in Rome. Edward Gibbon called the domed ballroom, which hosted glitzy concerts, ‘the wonder of the eighteenth century and of the British empire’, but Von La Roche could not agree.

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