“Beginning with the Adams family and the making of classical Edinburgh, through the creation of the mercantile palaces of Glasgow and ending in the work of the brilliant and forlorn Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scottish architecture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a creative ambition that at times had an influence across Europe, yet failed to develop in the twentieth. It was a failure not of talent but of patronage: the wealth and wish for prestige of the landowners, the industrialists and the nobility had either gone or gone south.”