However, the parish continued to grow, and a building fund for a new edifice was started in 1899.
The ideological dispute that preoccupied Turgenev was between well-meaning liberals who believed in gradualist reform and their children, who emerged from university impatient to demolish the whole establishment edifice and start again.
But as the violence began in Syria around a year ago, the edifice Akhras had built started to crumble.
Folkestone, another once glorious seaside town that fell on hard times as visitors abandoned it, is having significant success with its programme of cultural regeneration, although, unlike Margate, it worked hard at a grassroots level before it started indulging its edifice complex (and Quarterhouse is relatively modest in size, sitting snugly on a town street).
For example, we worked hard to get a few short lines of a secret court opinion declassified because we knew that once we started pulling out the threads, eventually the whole secret law edifice would start to unravel.
But the whole edifice crumbles when you start to ask questions about it.
As for co-determination, that system has started to look rather out of step with the imperatives of an accelerating global economy.Seen from outside, the edifice of German industrial relations has withstood global pressures surprisingly well: in 2001, 63% of employees in the country's west and 44% in the east were still covered by collective agreements.
Then maybe, perhaps maybe, we can all tear down this edifice of lies that we call a country and start building a home for all Syrians and not just some.
Some may disagree, but it seems likely that Townshend's book will be the definitive account of what started as little more than an urban skirmish and in the end proved to be the first serious crack in the edifice of the British empire.
"If I were the Department of Justice prosecutors, I'd be nervous, because if Bulger starts to talk, the whole edifice they have created about John being the corrupt agent will have holes you could drive a truck through," he said.
