I walked past Islington’s South Library this afternoon with its beautiful brickwork and monumental entrance, an unexpected piece of English baroque detailing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find it was designed by Mervyn Macartney, who was Surveyor of St. Paul’s Cathedral, so an expert on Wren, publishing a book on Later Renaissance Architecture in England in 1901.

The library was finished in 1916, not a good year for architecture and was immediately taken over as a Food Control Office:-