In a provincial Victorian city a vast brooding monolith has recently obtruded itself into the ‘built environment’, usurping the church spires and nineteenth-century clock towers of town hall and railway station as the skyline’s most prominent feature. In appearance – all jagged angles and irregular planes – it proclaims with a leaden insensitivity that it is government offices and, as such, it bestrides the streets around it like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.