The Sunday Times

What would £6,000 buy you in Dublin? A porch? Half a loft conversion? A third of a car-parking space? For John Henry Newman it was enough - 150 years ago, admittedly - to build University Church, possessor of one of the city's most intriguing interiors. Hidden behind a low brick porch and "flying" bell-house near the Department of Foreign Affairs on St Stephen's Green, the church was conceived as a large barn decorated "in the style of a basilica, with Irish marbles and copies of standard pictures" - and became the most controversial building of its day. Designed by the artist John Hungerford Pollen and completed in 1856, the church was only the second basilica to be built north of the Alps and the earliest example of a revived Byzantine style in northern Europe. This was the time of the Gothic revival, popularised by the architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. An Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism, like Newman and Pollen, Pugin carried his enthusiasm for Gothic architecture - "that order of architecture so appropriate to the sacred temple" - to such a pitch that he would offer guests at his table a "Gothic pudding".