A Man of No Taste Whatsoever

Here was a man who might have been regarded as a person of refinement had he employed a leading architect to design his houses and to advise him upon the most effective way of placing them in the landscape: but Joseph Pocklington was blessed with enough self-confidence, or obstinacy, to persist in using his own plans and siting his buildings in unsuitable positions.  Moreover, he chose to carry out his more ambitious projects in the Lake District; an area where they were bound to come under the critical scrutiny of artists, poets, and dilettante connoisseurs of the picturesque; and so he became condemned as a man of no taste.  Possibly such censure would have been avoided if he had confined his activities to his native Nottinghamshire, where the sensibilities of his neighbours may not have been quite so refined, and where his only known critic had been the querulous John Byng, offended by Joseph's youthful architectural conceits at Carlton-on-Trent.