 The building was the object of public ridicule before it had even been completed , as a version of the design had been leaked to the Literary Gazette in 1833 . Two years before completion , its infamous " pepperpot " elevation appeared on the frontispiece of Contrasts ( 1836 ) , an influential tract by the Gothicist A. W. N. Pugin , as an example of the degeneracy of the classical style . Even William IV ( in his last recorded utterance ) thought the building a " nasty little pokey hole " , while William Makepeace Thackeray called it " a little gin shop of a building " . The twentieth @-@ century architectural historian Sir John Summerson echoed these early criticisms when he compared the arrangement of a dome and two diminutive turrets on the roofline to " the clock and vases on a mantelpiece , only less useful " . Sir Charles Barry 's landscaping of Trafalgar Square , from 1840 , included a north terrace so that the building would appear to be raised , thus addressing one of the points of complaint . Opinion on the building had mellowed considerably by 1984 , when the Prince of Wales called the Wilkins façade a " much @-@ loved and elegant friend " , in contrast to a proposed extension . ( See below ) 
