Aldous Huxley famously described Mumbai as "one of the most appalling cities of either hemisphere", with its "lavatory bricks and Gothic spires". The critic Robert Byron, although a wholehearted fan of New Delhi, was equally unenthusiastic, feeling moved to refer to downtown Mumbai in 1931 as "that architectural Sodom", claiming that "the nineteenth century devised nothing lower than the municipal buildings of British India. Their ugliness is positive, daemonic." Today, however, the massive erections of Empire and Indian free enterprise appear not so much ugly, as intriguing.