The Whitworth Gallery, in England’s booming second city, Manchester, is a cultural institution that took a walk in the park back in 1889—it was the first English art museum to adopt a parkland rather than urban setting.

The New Bodleian Library in the historic center of Oxford had for years been so unfashionable as to be all but invisible. Designed in the mid-1930s by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880–1960) in a stripped-down classical style, and not completed until 1946, it was already a throwback at a time when modernism was rising.