1909. In 1911, Reilly and Adshead led the opposition to a plan by Norman Shaw and the sculptor W Goscombe John to remodel the south front of St George's Hall in Liverpool. Shaw and John proposed to install a grandiose flight of entrance steps, flanked by equestrian statues in tribute to the recently dead King Edward VII. Reilly regarded the plan as an Edwardian Baroque subversion of the hall's "pure and sublime neo-classical concept". He remarked sarcastically, "What was the use of a great monumental building if it could not be used as a background to a man on a horse?" Shaw enlisted the support of Aston Webb, John Belcher, Hamo Thornycroft and Reginald Blomfield, but Reilly and Adshead won, and the scheme was abandoned. Neo-classicism Although Reilly objected to the more baroque aspects of the Beaux-Arts school, many of his precepts were based on what he believed to be Beaux-Arts principles. Stamp argues that Reilly's concept of Beaux-Arts was filtered through its American practitioners, and put too much emphasis on classical design. The architectural historian Alan Powers writes: Fashion in British architecture changed rapidly in the first quarter of the 20th century. Victorian Gothic was rejected, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh found his Scottish version of Art Nouveau outmoded. The architectural historian Gavin Stamp writes: Mackintosh blamed Reilly for this: "Nor will there be any daylight until it is impossible for pompous bounders like a well-known (at least well advertised) professor at Liverpool to have any say in architectural education. He is teaching efficiency, but even there he is only a 23rd rater because they do it already better in America." Mackintosh complained of Reilly's buildings with "cows' skulls, ill-formed babies with vegetable tails" and dismissed Reilly as "crushed with official recognition and journalistic approval." Despite Mackintosh's animadversions, Reilly was willing to find merit in architectural work of other styles than his own. In a 1931 volume, Representative British Architects of the Present Day, he devoted chapters not only to kindred spirits such as Adshead, but to a Gothic revivalist, Walter Tapper, and an Arts and Crafts advocate, Guy Dawber; others included were Herbert Baker, Blomfield, Clough Williams-Ellis, Edwin Lutyens, and Scott. The Times Literary Supplement observed, "No praise can be too high for the way in which the special aptitudes of the particular architects are brought forward and illustrated from their works." Later years By 1938, in the view