There's still a lot of debate over the pros and cons of the Empire, and both sides tend to rely on mythology. However, it's the hardware of empire that fascinates me.
In Georgetown (Guyana), many of the civic buildings were British-built – although they didn’t always look it. This is the interior of the Victoria Law Court (pictured). What do you call this style? Tropical Gothic?
Often, it seems, the Queen’s architects had let heat and fantasy go to their heads. I particularly like City Hall which looks like a runaway dolls house, and Blomfield’s cathedral used up so many trees that, even now, it's at risk of vanishing into the mud. As to Georgetown’s streets, it's only in the details that they're still lingeringly British; the "Hackney carriages", the EIIR letterboxes, the statue of a great sewage engineer, and a pair of Sebastopol cannons.
Once, however, I did see a large building site called ‘Buckingham Palace’, although – sadly, perhaps – before any resemblance had taken shape, the financing had failed.
Despite all these trappings, however, I now realise that the Georgetown isn't either truly British or truly South American but is a world of its own.