Stand at the back of the nave at Brompton Oratory in Kensington, London, and the architecture does something that very few interiors manage: it moves toward you. The long corridor of polished pews, the columns rising on either side, the high altar burning at the far end in gilded marble — the whole composition functions as a single directed force, pulling the eye and, the building insists, the soul.

This is not accidental beauty. The Oratory was opened in 1884, consecrated into a London still raw with suspicion toward Catholic worship, and every inch of its Baroque excess was a theological argument delivered in stone.