Time Team in Pugin-land: the director's take

Time Team director Brendan Hughes describes how he became immersed in the world of Augustus Pugin in making The God of Gothic.

The beginning of a journey
I love diaries. I love reading them. For me they give the best insight into someone's life. The minutiae are the things that are really important, because the small things illustrate the really big important ones.

You can tell a lot about someone from what is said in a diary. Augustus Pugin came alive to me one day sitting in the reading room of the British Library. I had gone there with my assistant producer, Karen Kirk. We had just been commissioned by Channel 4 to make a film following the restoration of Pugin's former family home, The Grange in Ramsgate. It was the beginning of a journey for both of us into the world of a man we came to respect hugely.

I was ploughing through paperwork when Karen handed a couple of thick books to me – Benjamin Ferrey's work on the life of Augustus Pugin. In there I discovered a magical world. A world of the man as I would never manage to see him through his buildings. A side of him I was unable to get across in the film we were making because we simply would never have the space or the time to do it justice.

Here was a man who loved life and who lived it to the full. I sat in the library devouring those books, annoyed that I had so little time to read them.

But they gave me a starting point. This was a family man. A man who loved his wife and his children. Who was restless, travelling all of the time in pursuit of excellence. A man who had the same worries we all have; he was short of cash, thought himself a failure, doubted his abilities. But he had a confidence in the rightness of his thought, a sureness of foot in the way he knew what he wanted to look at in a building. He knew what worked and how to make it work.

Pugin in perspective
Over the course of the next year or so, Karen and I worked periodically on the film. The idea was simple. It was to follow the building work at The Grange; and, in the course of doing that, to look at some of his other works and put The Grange and Pugin into some sort of perspective.

But it wasn't that simple. The building work was difficult to film. It was a gradual process, with small changes being made across long periods of time. Every time we went to Ramsgate it seemed like little progress had been made. What had changed since our last visit? Sometimes it was difficult to tell. Things were changing, but not in a way that would light up a film.

In parallel we were also looking at some of Pugin's other works. But we had a twofold problem. First, he had a huge body of work. Second, it was literally all over the country.

On the road again
We realised, like anyone who wants to study Pugin, that we just had to bite our tongues and get on with it. It meant travelling and travelling and travelling. On one trip we went from London to York, left there at 3pm and headed for Dorset. The saving grace at the end of it was a fantastic home-cooked lunch by Pugin historian Paul Atterbury's wonderful wife at their home in Dorset.

Karen and I had our own shorthand. Oscott. Scarisbrick. Cheadle. St Marie's Grange. All of these became places we just knew. We knew what they meant. We knew what we wanted.

We filmed in many of them. We visited many more. It felt like an enormous privilege. After many months the owners of St Marie's agreed to let us film the exterior. The Pugin Society's Michael Fisher turned up and opened doors for us at Alton Towers and in St Giles's.

Father Brian Doolan, at St Chad's in Birmingham, is a saint. After travelling for three hours, exhausted, we finally arrived with him one evening at about 5.30pm, thinking to ourselves that we would spend an hour (maybe) at the cathedral and then head to the hotel for a bath and some food. Three hours later we were still there, and happy to be so. I found his tour absolutely enthralling. The vestments defy description. I left with my head in a spin wondering how I would ever manage to do justice to the place in a film.

The privilege of filmmaking
This is the privilege we have as filmmakers. It's the best part of the job when someone opens a door and lets you into a world you know little about, but which completely blows you away.

One of those days happened the day before my father turned 70, when I turned up at the Palace of Westminster to meet with Alexandra Wedgwood from the Pugin Society. I was on my way to Belfast to my father's party and slotted the meeting in just before heading to Heathrow. So I ended up lugging a suitcase around the Palace while Alexandra talked Karen and me through Pugin's work there. I was dizzy when I left – a mixture of being overwhelmed and excited.

All along, in the back of my mind, was The Grange. How would it turn out? I feel like I know every nook and cranny of the place. I feel very close to it. But I really wasn't sure what I would think of it once it was finished.

The final recce
Then, early in January, I went there again, for a last recce before my final bit of filming. The place threw me once more.

I hadn't expected it to feel like it does. I sort of knew what to expect: I had seen the stonemason working on the windows; the lead guy on the roof, the carpenters, brickies, the paint restorers. I had seen the remnants of the original wallpaper. But there is something completely magical about the whole once you see it. The sum of the parts is much greater than any individual bit.

And now the film is finished. I still want to go back to the library. I am not tired of Augustus yet.

This is based on an article that first appeared in True Principles, the journal of the Pugin Society.

Brendan Hughes' website is at: www.bhughestv.co.uk

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