This inky trade can land a chap in some rum old places. Last Saturday night, for instance - while some of you were doubtless shaking a mean artificial hip at drug-fuelled orgies in Tunbridge Wells - I was squatting on the gritty floor of a sewage works in a dodgy part of southeast London, my back propped against Queen Victoria's ample bottom, listening to people singing medieval laments.

Perhaps I had better be more explicit with the actualité, as they don't often say on EastEnders. The singers were a group called The Clerks, who have imposed on themselves the delightfully eccentric task of bringing music to mighty industrial buildings that have never been serenaded before. And boy, did this venture hit the bullseye! The Crossness Pumping Station, you see, is no ordinary sewage works. Standing on a marshy bank of the Thames east of Greenwich, it is perhaps the finest edifice erected by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the great Victorian engineer who built London's sewers (and, by so doing, saved 20,000 people a year from a revolting death by cholera).

If you ever go to Crossness (and I really think you should) try to forget the faint but unmistakable pong of ... well, you know what. And the fact that, by its very nature, the building is located next to the accumulated product of what eight million Londoners ate last week. No, just feast your eyes on the ornate decorations that Bazalgette bestowed on the place. Here are intricate cast-iron screens, floridly coloured arcades of columns, Romanesque mosaics and arches - and, the crowning glory, a spectacular octagonal atrium at the building's heart. No wonder that Pevsner called Crossness “a Victorian cathedral”.

Then, once you've feasted your eyes, marvel at the reason for all this sublime craftsmanship. It wasn't to adorn a millionaire's mansion. Nor to impress visiting dignitaries. Nor to make life even more pleasant for the middle classes. This was a building whose sole function was to house the four massive engines that pumped London's sewage into the Thames. (The engines, incidentally, were loyally named after members of the 1864 Royal Family; hence my perch next to Queen Victoria.) In short, none of this profuse and beautiful riot of decoration was intended to be enjoyed by anyone except the humble workers who toiled there. But it's precisely that which makes the place so inspiring. Any corrupt civilisation can concoct grandiose architecture and fabulous decor for its bigwigs' palaces. But only the Victorians, the most indefatigable do-gooders in history, would have dreamt of lavishing such artistry on sewage workers.

And Crossness is no one-off. Just look at the gorgeous brickwork patterns gracing all those Victorian warehouses and factories now being flogged off, at £600,000 a go, as bijou apartments in London, Glasgow and Manchester. Look at St Pancras station - a “mere” railway terminus transformed into a breathtaking Gothic castle. Look at the majestic, marbled 19th-century banking halls that have been gratefully comandeered by Waterstones and Wetherspoons up and down the country.

Is there a lesson here for us? Of course there is. Just glance, if you can bear it, at the decor of your local supermarket or shopping mall, or the office where you work, or the station where you wait for your train, or the train itself. If it was constructed in your lifetime, it will almost certainly be as soulless and drearily functional as a toothpick. In the public realm, at least, the art of decoration - of investing buildings with colour and personality and interesting nooks and crannies, just for the fun of it - is as dead as a dodo.

Why? Partly because of the materials now in vogue. Our forerunners made their great public buildings out of exuberant red bricks, dazzling marble or characterful local stone. Ours, by contrast, is the age of glass, steel and high-tech composites: smooth, impersonal surfaces fashioned into chillingly inscrutable towers that repel the very notion of decoration.

And partly, I'm convinced, because we now view the world so often in two dimensions only: via the flat screens of TVs and computers. The result? We have grossly diminished our appreciation of the texture of things, and of the three-dimensional decorative arts - stone and wood carving; wrought iron - that so enlivened great architecture in the past.

But 21st-century corporate architecture isn't only about failed aesthetics. It also represents a huge failure of nerve. If you are a big bank or retail chain it's so much less risky to present an insipid, neutral face to the world, rather than vivid colours and bold decorative details to which people might actually react.

And there's something else that disturbs me about the bland buildings now going up. I get from them a strong whiff of a corporate culture that simply doesn't care about making our daily grind that little bit more fun. These days, it seems, architecture is all about flaunting power and status or maximising profits.

The galling thing is that ordinary people want decoration in their lives as much as ever. Walk along any residential road. Look at the huge efforts - physical, financial and imaginative - that people put into nurturing their gardens, or decorating their living rooms. What is our £10-billion-a-year obsession with DIY except a testament to our determination to stamp our own tastes on our private domains?

It's sad that a nation so manifestly bursting with flamboyant individualists should meekly accept such anodyne architecture in its public spaces. But I'll tell you something sadder still. It took a visit to a 150-year-old sewage works to make me realise that modern design is even crappier than the stuff pumped into the Thames by dear old Queen Victoria and her fellow engines.

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