I'm reading Agatha Christie's book "Dumb witness", in which there is a passage after Poirot and Hastings have their lunch and head to the church.
Though an attractive specimen of what the guidebook calls Early Perp., it had been so conscientiously restored in Victorian vandal days that little of interest remained.
What does the passage mean, especially "Victorian vandal" here?
Does it mean that "it had never been restored for such a long time that it lost its charm"? Or I'm I missing something?
Imagine you have an old house (or other building). It has a number of distinctive features - perhaps its windows are an unusual shape, or very large or small compared to how windows are now. Perhaps it has many small rooms or is one large open plan. Many people, when they "restore" a building like this, don't just fix up the surface finishes and repair holes and cracks -- they adjust the style to match what is current at the time. So the many small windows become one large one, or the large windows are replaced with several small ones, according to the fashion. The overly large (by the restorer's standards) fireplace is replaced with something smaller, or perhaps the fireplace is removed entirely, and so on. Rooms are merged or split, the kitchen is moved to a different place with all new fittings, and the like.
Some people, who like old houses better as they were, might consider such a restoration to be an act of vandalism, taking away or ruining "period features" that they hold to be "of interest". The use of a set phrase Victorian vandal days implies that a lot of people think that was being done to properties.
It very definitely doesn't mean that it was left unrestored for too long. It means that the restoration, which to be fair was almost certainly well-intentioned on the part of the restorer, took away what the speaker of your quote considers the good parts of the building.
This is a reference to a particular enthusiasm in Victorian times for "restoring" churches and other religious buildings. In some cases, this was a due to a desire to modernise them and others to replace what was lost during the pillage of religious institutions during the Reformation. The movement is known in retrospect as the Victorian Restoration although it has little to do with restoration projects as we now understand them.
The reason Christie uses the term "vandals" - and the reason why it's unconnected with modern restoration - is because these projects were, on the whole, unsympathetic to the original buildings and artworks and poorly done. They can thus be viewed as "vandalising" the charm of the buildings rather than restoring or improving them.
Quoting the entire passage, which situates Poiroit in a church, makes this clearer:
Poirot’s scrutiny of the interior of the church was brief. Though an attractive specimen of what the guidebook calls Early Perp., it had been so conscientiously restored in Victorian vandal days that little of interest remained.
So you can almost imagine some scathing quotes around the word "restored" to make clear that it is meant in an ironic way. The "restoration" was so bad that the church is no longer of interest to sightseers.
