Pugin's manifesto

Pugin’s first work as an architect was St Marie’s Grange, the house he built for himself just outside Salisbury. In the brilliance and originality of its conception and in its sadly disappointing end, the story of the Grange foretold the pattern of his later life and work.

In 1834, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was twenty-two and had already suffered a series of shattering bereavements. In the previous year he had lost both his parents, and his young wife had died in childbirth. Now, with a second wife, Louisa, and two young children, he was residing in Ramsgate and piecing together a living from antique dealing and design work. Meanwhile, he continued to foster his vision of Gothic architecture, which he believed, increasingly, to be a divinely revealed truth, the means of achieving social and moral change, and a return to the old Catholic faith in England. He was in London on business on October 16 when the Houses of Parliament caught fire.

It was the burning of old tally sticks that started the blaze, which spread rapidly through the Palace of Westminster. The original medieval building had been expanded, infilled, adapted and partitioned over the centuries into a highly combustible agglomeration that burned rapidly out of control. The flames were not extinguished until two o’clock the next morning, by which time the Palace was in ruins. The fire was seen, even at the time, to mark a period in national life. The huge crowds that watched from Westminster Bridge and from the boats that packed the River Thames knew that they were witnessing a historic moment. The old Palace, like the old Parliament before the Reform Act, like so much of the old order in England, had been ripe for destruction. There was something rotten in it that was being swept away for ever. Pugin was in the crowd, as were Turner and Constable, both of whom depicted the fire. Pugin’s father’s one-time business partner, the antiquary John Britton, also watched, already calculating which of his draughtsmen he should send to draw the ruins. Charles Barry, returning from Brighton by coach, saw the glow on the horizon. On hearing what it was, he is supposed to have said, “What a chance for an architect”.

The question of what should replace the old Palace was being discussed even while the ruins smouldered. What the new Parliament should look like, its meaning as a seat of government, its appearance, were topics for the press and for public and private debate. George IV’s extravaganza at Windsor Castle and the scandal of Buckingham Palace were still fresh in the public memory and reform was in the air, not only of Parliament but of public life and public building. The Morning Herald spoke for many in announcing that this time “the British people intend to have the choosing of the architects”.

A debate was launched that made architecture a subject of popular interest as never before in Britain. Nor, until the present Prince of Wales’s Hampton Court speech, 150 years later, provoked a similar discussion of modernism, was it ever again so topical. Journalists, architects, men of taste and pamphleteers, even politicians, were ready to pitch themselves into the fray. Pugin, despite his pessimism about the likely outcome, was promising himself a “few remarks” in print about Robert Smirke, who had been asked to report on the rebuilding. For the present, however, the discussion of the Palace formed the backdrop to other events in Pugin’s life, which began to unfold rapidly. With the legacy he had recently received from his aunt Selina, he had sufficient funds to build a house for himself, and that was what, more than anything, he wanted to do. It was to the city of Salisbury, which he had first loved as a boy and where he now had a group of friends, that he decided to move.

Typically, it was a mixture of the personal, the architectural and the spiritual that drew him. Among his friends were the stone mason William Osmond and his family, the kind of plain-spoken people, respectable rather than genteel, of an artisan class just below the middle, among whom Pugin felt most at ease. William and his wife Charity welcomed Pugin into their large family with some of that parental kindness whose lack he still felt. Charity told him off in a motherly way about his scruffy appearance and he smartened himself up for her. William introduced him around the town.  Among his acquaintance were others in the same line of work: the surveyor and builder Frederick Fisher, whose business premises were in the High Street, and the Peniston family, who had been architects and surveyors in Wiltshire for three generations.

The Penistons were also Catholics. Through them Pugin, whose resolution to leave the Church of England had neither diminished nor yet brought him to the point of action, met the small Catholic community of Salisbury. He was now, for the first time in his life, among Catholics, and he found them congenial. Like his friend the Catholic antiquary and architect Edward Willson, John Peniston was often employed to restore Anglican churches. Indeed, religious hostility to individuals was rare and it was a long time since Catholics had been actively persecuted. But there was a deeply rooted, if often ill-defined, dislike of “papistry”. Most English people knew little about it; many of them had never met a Catholic, for Catholics had been, for centuries, a small minority. The anti-Catholics largely formed their dark impressions, as Pugin had formed his ideal, from a combination of history and highly coloured fiction. The rhetoric of anti-popery leaned heavily on Guy Fawkes, Bloody Mary and the Spanish Inquisition. Such prejudice was noticeable in the conservative society of Salisbury, a city dominated by the cathedral and its affairs, where, some years later, strolling through the Close, Anthony Trollope conceived the idea of Barchester.

Reasoning that for purposes of “business” it was of no “very great importance where I am so [long] as a post can reach me”, Pugin bought a half-acre of land, just outside the city at Alderbury, for £150. It was expensive. Land was hard to come by, for most of it belonged to large estates or to the Church and this was the “only peice [sic] . . . . to be had near there for Love or money”. Situation, however, as Pugin and Osmond agreed, was everything and the site was perfect. It was sloping and close enough to Salisbury to command “a magnificent view of the cathedral and city with the river avon winding through the beautiful valley”. “Under me”, Pugin explained to Willson, in one of his ardently ungrammatical letters, “is Longford castle seat of Lord Radnor with its turrets & chimney shafts rising among the venerable oak & elms”. Pugin’s criteria were those of the textbook Picturesque. He had chosen a spot that Humphry Repton would have approved of for its rise and fall, its view and its noble associations; but the house Pugin built there, St Marie’s Grange, would have scandalized Repton, as it did nearly everyone who saw it. As its name and dedication to the Virgin declared, Pugin intended his home to be a manifesto. It marked the start of a new life, a new profession and a new faith. It was the first demonstration of his vision of the Gothic as a revived, living style. To the astonishment and often undisguised mirth of passers-by, a turreted, fortified, red-brick house, apparently blown out of the pages of a Book of Hours, began to rise rapidly next to the main Southampton road. The Grange, which though altered still survives, was the fruit of Pugin’s peculiar education, a mixture of Picturesque cottage and fifteenth-century house. In designing it he took the theories of Uvedale Price and Repton and applied them with radical logic. He started with a ground plan, as they would have done, creating an L-shaped pattern of interconnecting rooms on three floors. The stairs were in a corner tower, water closets for each floor in another tower. Behind these, rising through two storeys, was a chapel with a little bellcote on top.

The different parts of the building, chapel, sacristy, stair tower, were all adapted “to the various purposes for which they were required”, as Picturesque theory dictated. The irregular exterior appearance was “formed only”, as his father had put it, “from motives of convenience in building”. This meant that Pugin put windows only where he needed light or wanted a view. His library looked out to the north-west and the south-west, towards the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. Towards the road the house presented a completely blank face. There was no visible door and no window. Not only was the facade blank, it was defended. Between the raised ground floor and the road there was a dry moat with a working drawbridge, overlooked by a watchtower. No other architect, however strictly Picturesque, would have had such a disregard for convention as to present a brick wall to the outside world. But Pugin had no hesitation. It was an eloquent gesture, for his house was both a retreat from the world and an assault on it. Ever since his parents’ death he had been increasingly prey to nightmares, fear of burglary, and other fears less rational: the paraphernalia of the Gothic, in all its most clichéd forms, ghosts, sleepwalkers and all the assembled terrors of the night. His fortified house expressed his subjective dread, and also his strong streak of self-dramatization. The thickness of the walls (three feet, he boasted to a friend), the moat, the lookout, were more necessary for his peace of mind than his physical safety. He went so far as to conceal the well, as was common in the Middle Ages, to prevent tampering by enemies. Like a medieval jewel case, the Grange was rebarbative on the outside while within all was to be richness, intimacy and glowing colour. Pugin’s collections of antiquities, “fine old damask. stone chimney oak furniture”, made the rooms luxurious in a solemn way. He bought a “gilt Chalice of the 15th Cent.” for his chapel, and medieval embroidery for his altar which he picked up for the price of the silver thread. The bedrooms interconnected. The parlour led into the library, from which the chapel opened out. Parents and children, work and love and worship, were all to be contained inside the Gothic fastness. Servants, whose kitchen and scullery were on the lower ground floor, would use the same entrance as the family. It was a highly eccentric domestic arrangement. The Grange certainly “formed a striking contrast to the class of modern suburban houses generally erected”, as Pugin’s former fellow pupil the more conventional Benjamin Ferrey put it, with a smirk.

The high-pitched roofs with gilded weathervanes and cresting, the stone casement windows with mullions instead of wooden sashes, made the house conspicuous and, to many people, ridiculous. Pugin chose red brick because he could not afford stone, and red brick had many medieval precedents, but to most people in Georgian England it was principally associated with modern warehouses and factory workers’ cottages. Repton’s view was that while brick was acceptable for a large, historic building such as Hampton Court, “A compact red house displeases from the meanness of its materials”, and most people agreed with him that it was barely decent for a gentleman’s villa. Among the red, Pugin set black bricks to mark out a cross and the initial letter “M”, for Marie (always his preferred spelling of Mary). When the house was finished it bore two inscriptions: “Laus Deo” (Praise the Lord) and “Hanc domum cum capella edificavit Augustus de Pugin 1835” (This house and chapel were built by Augustus de Pugin 1835). Thus, though no passer-by could see into the house, travellers on the six coaches a day between Salisbury and Southampton could literally read its meaning. They were, Pugin reported, “astonished beyond measure”. This first house was a work of Romantic art, a building with which its creator was entirely, subjectively identified. In it Gothic was realized as a total, organizing belief, running through both conception and construction, the appearance of the building, and the kind of life that would be lived in it. This, Pugin believed, was what architecture could and should do. It was his own answer to the questions being debated in London about the design of the new Houses of Parliament, his personal attempt to mould “the intellect of the age”.

It was also very much a young man’s building, trying to do too much at once. It was not entirely practical. With its spiral staircase, drawbridge, watchtowers, sacristy and chapel, the Grange had only two bedrooms. In one sense it was not an important building, for it influenced nobody. Ferrey thought it “tended rather to show the eccentricity of its owner than his superior skill in design”, and even a sympathetic Nikolaus Pevsner diagnosed it as “a case of extreme medievalism”. Yet while it remains to some extent a cul-de-sac in English architecture, it was prescient, not least in the elements of its design that seemed most scandalous to Georgian eyes. In the 1830s a respectable villa had sash windows, pediments and either stone or stuccoed walls. Today’s “modern suburban house” will, like St Marie’s, have casement windows, may well be built of red brick and will almost certainly have a pitched roof.

Work on the Grange began in January 1835 and went ahead fast. Pugin, though he knew a great deal about medieval architecture and construction, had no training as an architect. He never considered this a handicap and it was not, in 1835, so unusual. The profession had yet to organize and formalize. Many aspiring architects did train in architectural offices, but it was not a requirement and in Pugin’s view such an education was worse than useless. Nevertheless he was faced with the need to create a modus operandi. Only one perspective drawing and a ground plan of St Marie’s Grange survive. Although there may once have been more drawings, there is no reason to think that they were more detailed. Pugin had begun as he would go on, making only the briefest possible outline plans and sketches. Later he did make more detailed drawings for some of his buildings, but he always disliked doing it. He found the process irritating and fiddly. He preferred to use a builder who understood medieval construction and could grasp what he wanted from little more than outlines. In this case, his collaborator was John Michael, the eldest son of his friend John Peniston. Pugin, impatient as ever, was constantly at his side as the work went on.

From 1835 onwards most of Pugin’s diaries survive. They are little appointment books, erratically filled with notes of accounts, work, addresses and laconic references to events. The personal, the newsworthy and the sensational are freely interspersed. “Harlequin Steamer burnt in London” is the first entry for 1835. After that the notes describe a round of visits from Ramsgate to London and Salisbury, sometimes with “my dear Louisa”, more often alone. There are numerous purchases: oak, pictures and unspecified antiquities from the London dealer Edward Hull. Among jottings about the weather, removal arrangements and shipping, there are references, equally brief, to Pugin’s religious life. “Fast of Lent begins”, he noted on March 4, and on March 7, cryptically, “St Thomas Aquinas”. Pugin seems to have regarded himself now as a Catholic, writing to Willson about “our faith” as if he had in fact converted. Yet he still held back from the final step. It was probably about now that he began to re-use the journal of his honeymoon with his first wife Anne Garnett, writing on the blank pages, in a smaller, better-formed hand, a personal manual of Catholicism. He wrote out prayers, lists of vestments, notes of the meanings of Ember days, the cardinal virtues, “fasting days”. He was also trying to make good his lack of Latin, copying inscriptions and parts of the liturgy. The symbolic meaning of vestments interested him particularly.

Professionally he began to apply himself. That winter he told Willson, “I have had as much business & more than I can do”. He was often on the move but the restless wanderings of the past year or so were over. The “reshearches” as he called them were turned to account, the contents of his sketch books and some of his earlier Ideal Schemes were being worked up for books of designs, in the style of his father’s Gothic Furniture, to be published by Ackermann and Co. Rudolph Ackermann had died the year before. His son was running the business, and Ackermann Jun. and Pugin Jun. produced their first joint effort, Gothic Furniture in the style of the 15th century, in April. For Pugin it was a pragmatic venture. “I am paid a certain sum for each plate”, he explained to Willson, “& as it is a useful cheap work I expect it will sell well”. Unlike his father’s Gothic Furniture, which attempted to replicate the entire contents of a Regency drawing room in the style of the Middle Ages, this was a collection of pieces that could more plausibly suggest the fifteenth century. He was beginning to imitate medieval furniture as it had been, rather than applying medieval motifs, taken from architecture or window tracery, to modern furniture. It was a decided step towards integrity of design.

His friend the Scottish architect Gillespie Graham was also employing him. Pugin was making drawings for a number of Graham’s works, one of them an Ursuline convent in Edinburgh. Such an establishment would have been not only illegal but inconceivable in Scotland a decade earlier. Its inspiration had been in part that of Pugin’s uncle’s former patron, the Duchesse d’Angoulême. During her exile at Holyrood she had encouraged a Catholic priest, James Gillis, the future bishop, to attempt the convent. The Duchesse had taken a great liking to Gillis, and so, in time, would Pugin. St Margaret’s Convent was one of the earliest buildings of the Catholic Revival, a flower of the Waverley age, now bearing fruit.

As the winter of 1835 came to an end, Pugin’s house progressed. He was concerned with every aspect of it. He proposed to carve the stone himself. He wanted coloured glass for the windows and began to learn glass painting. He designed candlesticks and had them made in London, as well as bookcases to fit into the deep recesses beside the chimney breasts. He wove the fabric of his life into the decoration, with his own and Louisa’s initials in the spandrels of doors and chimney pieces. He had texts painted on the cornices; “Gloria in Excelsis” was written over the chapel door. It was about now, according to Talbot Bury, who engraved the plates for some of Pugin’s books of designs, that he added the motto “en avant”, which was entirely his own invention, to his coat of arms and from now on certainly he plunged into life again at a frantic pace. He had much to look forward to and, perhaps, a fear of looking back. For the rest of his life he worked like a man driven, or pursued.

At the beginning of May, when the house was nearly finished, he and Louisa packed their belongings, handed over the keys and set off for Salisbury. Sarum, as he usually called it, using its ancient name, had been first founded nearby, at Old Sarum, by the Bishop St Osmund in the eleventh century. Osmund’s foundation documents survive in the cathedral library, where Pugin was now often to be found reading. He could see there, too, the texts of the Sarum Rite. This “Use of Sarum”, compiled by Osmund initially to determine the forms of liturgy and other practices of his own cathedral, became established in the Middle Ages as the principal model for secular (that is non-monastic) worship throughout Britain. Only after the Reformation, in the reign of Mary I, was the Roman Breviary introduced. In the Sarum Rite was embodied that continuous, native Catholic tradition, a tradition in communion with but independent from Rome, for which Pugin was searching. Salisbury was now confirmed as the hub not just of his own world but of the true English Church, past and soon to come.

Meanwhile the modern city was marked by the signs of the times. Old Sarum had been one of the most notorious rotten boroughs, sending members to Parliament long after it ceased to be inhabited, and its name was often invoked in the debates on electoral reform as a byword for corruption. Salisbury had seen its share of violence in the riots of 1830 and 1831. The Established Church, here as everywhere else, was a subject of controversy and criticism. The year that Pugin arrived, the Municipal Reform Act redrew the boundaries of the city and removed the last vestiges of secular power from the bishop. Everyday life was modernizing. The streets were lit by gas. Seven coaches a day ran to London. There were frequent popular balloon ascents, of which Pugin took note in his diary. Charles Macready appeared at the local theatre in Hamlet (a performance described as “tame almost to insipidity” by the Salisbury and Winchester Journal) and among the lectures at the Mechanics’ Institute was one by John Peniston on “The Progress of Architecture as connected with History”, a subject on which he had no doubt received a great deal of advice from his client.

During the spring and summer of 1835, St Marie’s Grange was made ready. The finishing was done, like everything else, at top speed. “Trees planted and walks laid out”, Pugin noted on April 13. The garden was in a formal, architectural style, with walls and regular beds, in keeping with a medieval or Elizabethan house. It is one irony of his reinterpretation of the Picturesque that Pugin could not abide picturesque gardens, which seemed to him modern and contrived. On July 10, he “bought brewing utensils”. More furniture and carpets followed. Although he and Louisa were still in lodgings, they were settling into life in the town. Pugin made himself known to the local nobility and gentry, not least in hopes of getting patronage. He dined with Lord Radnor and prepared drawings for remodelling the facade of Longford Castle, a scheme which was never carried out. He had more luck with Sir Frederick Hervey-Bathurst, whose house, Clarendon Park, was near St Marie’s Grange and for whom he designed a small lodge.

“My house is now nearly compleated”, he told Willson, “the minutest details have been attended to and the whole effect is very good.” At the same time he noted that it was causing a stir: “the reports respecting my building here are truly ridiculous”. He had no doubts about it himself. The little house sparkled. Borrowing an idea from Repton, Pugin had added a gilded “chrest of fleur de Lis” to the top of the roof and glittering weathervanes “(turning with every Wind)” which had “a very good effect”. In July he went to France and “purchased some magnificent things” for his chapel. By now Pugin, like his house, was a conspicuous local talking point, gossiped about more and more wildly than he realized. He never had much sense of how he struck other people. His extravagance attracted notice and perhaps it was this, combined with his rough and ready manners and the sailing clothes he favoured, even on land, that caused rumours to reach Willson in Lincoln that his young friend was running a smuggling gang. “I cannot conceive how such reports as that . . . can be set afloat”, Pugin wrote back, horrified.
At Whitsun, a traditional time for the reception of converts, Pugin, who had been smartening up the small and somewhat run-down local Catholic chapel, had noted laconically in his diary: “Finished alterations at Chapel received into the Holy Catholic Church”.

St Marie’s Grange was near enough finished to be habitable in September, and Pugin, as he took possession of his fortress, was ready for battle on several fronts. He was now an established, indeed a leading, member of the congregation at the St Martin Street Chapel, where, with Lambert, he officiated as an acolyte at Mass. They wore the robes that he had designed for them and which, he reported to Willson, were “handsome and quite correct . . . worked by the Ladies of the Chapel”. In fact, he added with a note of theatricality, “I assure you you would hardly know me when issuing from the sacristy door in full canonicals”. He had no conception of comporting himself tactfully towards his fellow townspeople on religious matters and told Willson that he had “to sustain a heavy attack continually on the score of religion – In which however I consider I always come off victorious”.

It was not long, however, before the new house, with its two interconnecting bedrooms, began to be inconvenient, for by October 1836 the Pugins had three children. Louisa may have protested its remoteness, and Pugin himself was realizing that as his work took him ever more often to the Midlands he would find it difficult to be there. So, in September 1837, less than three months after the last of the gilding had been added to the vanes on the roof of the Grange, Pugin left his odd, original house still unfinished and took lodgings for himself and his family in Chelsea. Number 3 Prospect Place was not Gothic, it was one of a row of late-seventeenth-century houses near the Old Church, but at least it stood “on the ground formerly occupied by the Mansion of Sir T More”. The Pugins shared Jane Carlyle’s “noble contempt for fashion – Chelsea being highly unfashionable”, which meant that they too could afford a large house “quite to our humour”. Before the Thames was embanked, the character of Chelsea was determined by the river. Thomas Carlyle described Cheyne Walk in terms that make the area’s appeal to Pugin obvious. It was “a broad highway with huge shady trees . . . and a smell of shipping and tar . . . with white-shirted white trousered Cockneys dashing by like arrows in their long canoes”, and “beyond, the green beautiful knolls of Surrey with their villages. On the whole a most artificial green-painted yet lively fresh almost opera-looking business”.

The water, the bustle, the touch of the theatrical bordering on the brash, would have suited Pugin and no doubt Louisa, placing her, when she must be apart from her husband, in more congenial circumstances. The modest houses were interspersed with coffee shops, pawnbrokers, a printer and other small trade premises. Wherries were drawn up on the foreshore, and just beyond Battersea Bridge there was a boatyard belonging to the Greaves, the family of boatmen who ferried Turner. It was the artisan Greaves rather than the cerebral Carlyles that Pugin and Louisa got to know. Other old London friends and acquaintances, the painters William Etty and Clarkson Stanfield, could visit more easily, and Pugin, who had grown up in a house full of people, always welcomed visitors. The “retired life” had never, in practice, suited him, and whatever pang he felt at leaving behind his first work of architecture, he was not now given to retrospection. Although the lodgings in Chelsea were intended at first to be temporary, he made only four visits to Salisbury over the next two years, and St Marie’s Grange stood empty and unlet.

On June 21, 1841, the day Pugin’s first cathedral was consecrated in Birmingham, he wrote in his diary “Salisbury sold”. His first house, his first complete building, one of the most interesting houses in the history of English architecture, had been put up for auction. Most ignominiously it was bought by Mr Staples, the original owner of the land, for a mere £500, a quarter, perhaps, of what it had cost. Pugin was by now famous, successful and busily hurtling “en avant” into a hectic career. St Marie’s Grange was left behind and little thought of, and yet its strengths and weaknesses were Pugin’s own. The years that followed saw the cycle of invention, success and disillusionment repeat itself over and over again before his short working life came to a bitter, premature end with his death in 1852, at the age of forty. 
 

This is an edited extract from God’s Architect: Pugin and the building of Romantic Britain by Rosemary Hill, published this week by Allen Lane.

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Rosemary Hill is a member of the Twentieth Century Society.