Vicissitudes ...

... A case in point | The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Peterborough is essentially a sublime cathedral surrounded by a festival of British modernist architectural incompetence and brutalism, sponsored by a council planning committee that was both without taste and — let us at least hope, for it is the only charitable interpretation of what the committee has wrought — corrupt.
Civilisation having been thus destroyed, a small effort at resuscitation was taking place while I was there. A string quartet was playing Haydn’s opus 77 number 2 under the market hall, built in 1671, through whose graceful arcade could be seen the hideous concrete frame of a building that would have gladdened the heart (if that is quite the word for it) of Leonid Brezhnev or Erich Honecker.