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A.W.N.
Pugin
David Frazer Lewis
Victorian Architects Series Liverpool: University Press, 2021 Paperback. viii +160 pp. ISBN 978-1800348646. £30
Reviewed by Jacqueline Banerjee The Victorian Web Published on behalf of Historic
England, and bearing the imprint of the Victorian Society, this book could
hardly have come with better credentials. Moreover, it was commissioned from
the architectural historian who for four years edited True Principles,
the peer-reviewed journal of the Pugin Society. As a contribution to Historic
England’s new Victorian Architects series, it is just what it should be: a
compact overview of Pugin’s works and the man and ideas behind them. It also
examines his reputation. Without special pleading – conceding, for example,
that Pugin and Sir Charles Barry collaborated even on the details of the Houses
of Parliament – Lewis nevertheless establishes the astonishing scale and
continuing relevance of Pugin’s achievement in both architecture and design. The book is sensibly divided into four
main sections. The first of these, “The house of God”, deals with Pugin’s
church-building, starting with St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham, begun in
1841. Here, Lewis gives a brief definition of the “Use of Sarum”: “the
distinctive form of worship practiced by English Catholics, the medieval
liturgy of the Diocese of Salisbury, which had been used over most of southern
England until it was banned after the reign of Mary I”, and which involved
“several vested deacons, censing of many altars, cross-bearers, suspended
lights, and numerous acolytes bearing candles” [16]. St Chad’s was not Pugin’s
first church (that was St James’s, Reading, begun in 1837), nor even his first
Gothic Revival church (that was the Church of the Assumption at Bree, County
Wexford, begun in 1838), but his revised design for St Chad’s was ready by
1841, and Lewis explains that it was the first one to make full provision for
such rituals. Lewis is good at picking out the
telling detail, and at the same time relating it to the much larger context. What
does the rough granite of Pugin’s County Wexford churches have in common with
the knapped flint of St Augustine’s, Ramsgate, for instance? Here, Lewis can
call on the architect himself: Pugin explained in his Apology for the
Revival of Christian Architecture in England, in 1843, that the “ancient
builders” adapted “their edifices to localities”, so that “they seemed as if
they formed a portion of nature itself … growing from the sites in which they
were placed” [qtd. p. 30]. As throughout, the illustrations clinch Lewis’s
case. It is hard to imagine his atmospheric view of Kilarney, for example,
without Pugin’s St Mary’s – just as, later, it would be hard to imagine Cobh
without his son Edward’s cathedral there. This chapter is particularly useful
on Pugin’s work and influence in Ireland, although, of course, there is much
about St Giles in Cheadle and his other well-known English churches. There is
also a welcome discussion of the churches he designed for Australia, which seem
not to belong to the landscape there at all: here, Lewis suggests, the idea of
harmonising with the locale had been overridden by the architect’s commitment
to both the Catholic and Gothic Revivals, and his desire to plant them, even if
rather incongruously, in new territories. Pugin was driven, but not inflexible.
In planning St Mary’s Cathedral, Newcastle, for instance, and his later
churches, he would take into account the needs of congregations following more
contemporary forms of Catholic worship. After the “house of God” comes the
“house of man”, and chapter two deals mainly with Pugin’s own homes, and his
country houses, once again including their interiors. The first, the house that
he designed for himself and his second wife Louisa and their young family, was
St Marie’s Grange near Salisbury (1835), and, for all its eccentricities and failings
it proved to be a useful seedbed for his ideas. Certainly, the books and print
collection that he gathered around him in his library there greatly influenced
his future design work – not so much in particular detail, Lewis hastens to
add, as in spirit. This spirit would feed through into the Arts and Crafts
Movement that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Pugin’s work on the Bishop’s House in
Birmingham, Alton Towers in Staffordshire, Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire, and
others, is usefully described, but inevitably his own last home, The Grange in
Ramsgate, takes pride of place. This was built only nine years after the
earlier Grange, in 1844. Yet Pugin had packed so much into those intervening
years that he was now well known – so much so that he was bothered by the architectural
sightseers descending on what was, after all, a private abode. Here again, his
influence was tremendous: the sturdy brick-built house with rooms of different
character and purpose opening off its spacious central hall and landing, and
dictating the external form of the building (including its very windows), was,
says Lewis, “the heart that would pump the blood of Pugin’s domestic principles
into the suburbs and villages of Britain” [77]. Out went the extra staircase
for servants, in came the casual, and often noisy, intermingling of the
middle-class family home. The third chapter deals with Pugin’s
designs for educational establishments. Again, there is hardly any need to push
the case for his influence: The quietly radical notion that
environment played a role in education, with its implication that the Gothic,
especially, gave the greatest encouragement to Christian character, would
become a dominant idea in the design of universities in the English-speaking
world. It generated countless ivy-covered Gothic quadrangles over the next
hundred years, from Glasgow to Melbourne to Princeton. [87-88] However, Pugin’s meticulously prepared
designs for rebuilding and extending Balliol College in Oxford, complete with
tower and battlements, oriels, feature chimneys and so on, caused a furore there
in 1843. They were firmly rejected, depriving him of his one big chance to
contribute to the Oxford streetscape. Only ten years later, though, William
Butterfield built a new chapel at Balliol based closely on Pugin’s designs. By
then, there was no escaping his influence. Pugin left a more direct mark on the
chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge, which he restored in the late 1840s.
Students of Sir George Gilbert Scott will understand his own restoration practices
better after reading this chapter: Pugin had no compunction about removing late
medieval work if it contradicted whatever clues were left from even earlier
work, and Scott would follow suit in many a project of his own. As Pugin’s failure at Balliol
indicates, his was not at all a simple success story. Lewis confirms that, in
general, his architectural career was a fraught one, with schemes that were
dear to his heart, for Balliol and Downside Abbey in Somerset, for instance,
going unrealised. “I have passed my life in thinking of fine things, studying
fine things, designing fine things, and realizing very poor ones”, the beleaguered
architect wrote poignantly [qtd. p. 112]. But his built and written work was
already having its effect. It would continue to influence other architects,
including major ones like Scott and Butterfield, long after his untimely death
at forty. The climax of this book comes in the
fourth chapter, with its discussion of the Houses of Parliament. As indicated
earlier, Lewis deals calmly with the difficult question of who deserves more
credit here – Barry or Pugin. He points out that even Pugin’s best-known work,
the iconic clock-tower that we usually call Big Ben, “showed the hand of both
architects” [117], and this, he says, is true throughout. Noting that Pugin’s
wonderful Gothic detailing was constantly subject to Barry’s scrutiny, Lewis
concludes that this detailing ended up enlivening, to just the right extent,
what would still have been a stately and impressive building without it – albeit
perhaps “a little dry” [121]. This might be going too far: the Palace of
Westminster, stripped of its detailing, would be not so much dry as positively
dull. However, Lewis allows himself to promote wholeheartedly Pugin’s influence
on design education. While superintending wood-carving for the interiors, he
assembled a whole collection of medieval artefacts and casts to inspire his
craftsmen, and then ensured that these items were kept for future study. Lewis
also notes that at this time Pugin designed a Gothic showroom for the decorator
John Crace in fashionable Wigmore Street. His entrepreneurial streak was again
in evidence at the celebrated Medieval Court at the Crystal Palace. By such
efforts, as well as through this one great showpiece in Westminster, he
single-handedly raised the profile of medieval design, and the traditions,
culture and spirit that it embodied, right across the board. Pugin’s own profile is now very high. In
our own times, he has been well served by some outstanding scholars. These
include Rosemary Hill, with her biography, God’s Architect : Pugin and
the Building of Romantic Britain (2007);
Margaret Belcher, with her many years of work on Pugin’s Letters (2001-2015);
and Gerard Hyland with The Architectural Works of A.W.N. Pugin : A
Catalogue (2014). Moreover, the activities and publications of the Pugin
Society, founded in 1995, have attracted a whole new generation of “Puginites”.
Lewis’s book is not a comprehensive guide: Londoners who have made pilgrimages
to St Peter’s, Woolwich, or been to admire Pugin’s East window at William
Wardell’s Our Ladye Star of the Sea in Greenwich, will be disappointed to find
no mention of them here. But he treats the main works perceptively and in
context, and follows Pugin’s developing vision in all its different
manifestations. This succinct account provides an excellent all-round and up-to-date
entry into an architect whose high ideals still inspire us today. ☞ Illustrated version on The Victorian Web : https://victorianweb.org/art/architecture/pugin/lewis.html
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