The Forgotten Cathedral: Byzantium comes to Westminster

"To paraphrase John Lennon, Westminster Cathedral isn't the most famous church in the world, it's not even the most famous church in Westminster. While millions of tourists a year flood through the ticket office of Westminster Abbey, keying numbers in the inexplicably sicky audio guides and gawping through the railings at ancient Kings and Queens, only five minutes down the road stands a neighbour who is seldom included on a pre-planned itinerary. Westminster Cathedral is halfway between Victoria Station and Parliament Square but it might as well be halfway between Venice and Istanbul."

Edwin Seward: The Man Who Built Cardiff

Occasionally an architectural style can be so dominant in a city that it becomes a kind of local vernacular. Bath is given its identity by the Regency Neoclassical, Bristol has its own variation on the Byzantine, Oxford is high-gothic and Coventry is mid-century modern. York is known by its warren of medieval streets and Aberdeen has its own particular granite solidity. Amongst all these, Cardiff, capital of Wales, must be the city of mongrel architecture, an architecture of eclecticism that takes from all styles and sources to make something utterly original, and it would seem this can be traced back to one man, Edwin Seward.