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In a 16-year period in the middle of the 19th century, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852), the son of a French émigré draughtsman and watercolourist, designed and built six cathedrals, 40 churches and numerous private houses. Through his designs, buildings and writings, he helped to shape the way the Victorians thought about architecture. And his ideas on private houses and domestic design – put into practice most freely in his own family home at The Grange, in Ramsgate – left a permanent mark on the British landscape.
Pugin is best known today for his work on the Houses of Parliament in London. In 1834, the old Palace of Westminster burnt down and Charles Barry was appointed as the architect in charge of constructing its replacement. Barry hired Pugin, who was only 25 at the time, to work on the interior design.
Pugin did that and much more. In addition to designing everything from the dozens of different kinds of wallpaper to the upholstery pins in the furniture, he was also responsible for much of the external detail of the new building. Indeed, many architectural historians today regard the design success of the Palace of Westminster as being more due to Pugin than to Barry.
Pugin didn't get the full credit he deserved during his own lifetime. Yet the Victorian Gothic revival owes much to his passion and propagandising for what he called 'the pointed architecture' of the medieval era. His championing of the importance of great craftsmanship across various trades echoed the fine works and attention to detail of the Middle Ages, and was a forerunner of the arts and crafts movement and the ideas of William Morris. And he eagerly embraced the new methods and materials of the industrial age, bringing them together in a new fusion of the old and the new.
In his short life, Pugin produced a seemingly endless stream of designs for tiles, ceramics, metalwork, wallpaper, furniture, stained glass and much more. As well as the Houses of Parliament, his buildings included St Chad's cathedral in Birmingham, the church of St Giles at Cheadle, in Staffordshire, the nearby Alton Towers – and his family home, The Grange, in Ramsgate, which he built together with the adjacent church of St Augustine.
In The God of Gothic, Time Team followed the restoration of The Grange by the Landmark Trust, and set it in the wider context of Pugin's other work – all of it accomplished in such a short period of time because Pugin died aged just 40.
The Grange in Ramsgate will be open to the public 17Ð20 May. Visits at other times may be possible by arrangement. More information can be found here: www.landmarktrust.org.uk/visiting/openingtimes.htm#grange.
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
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.
How much do you know about Augustus Pugin? Try our quick quiz to see how you score.
At the age of just 15, Pugin was hired to do what?
Draw watercolours for George III
Design wallpaper for Hampton Court
Design furniture for Windsor Castle
What did Pugin do in 1834 that he regarded as the most important decision in his life?
Started building The Grange at Ramsgate
Started work on the Palace of Westminster
Converted to Catholicism
Which of Pugin's designs was the only one that he said had not been curtailed by financial considerations?
The Grange at Ramsgate
The Palace of Westminster
St Chad's cathedral
Pugin was very fond of sailing and the sea throughout his life, and was shipwrecked off Leith in 1830. What did he usually wear that represented this interest?
A sailor's jacket
A sailor suit
A sailor's hat
Where was Pugin sent for a short period in 1852 as a result of mental illness?
The Bedlam asylum
Lourdes
Coventry
Which of the following, now a popular amusement park, was designed by Pugin?
Tivoli Gardens
Alton Towers
Thorpe Park
Answers here.
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
By Pugin
There are three key publications by Augustus Pugin in which he set out his views on architecture. These are:
Contrasts: or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and similar Buildings of the Present Day; showing the Present Decay of Taste: Accompanied by appropriate Text (Salisbury, 1836, 2nd enlarged edition, London, 1841);
The True Principles of Christian or Pointed Architecture (London, 1841); and
The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England (London, 1843, republished from the Dublin Review, where it first appeared in two parts: Part I in Vol X, May 1841 and Part II in Vol XII, February 1842)
The first two of these, Contrasts and True Principles, have been published as one volume in facsimile by the Pugin Society with Spire Books. Copies are available, price £33.95 per copy, plus £3 postage and packing, from Spire Books Ltd, PO Box 2336, Reading RG4 5WJ.
The third of the above has been published in facsimile under the title Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture and Some Remarks Relative to Ecclesiastical Architecture and Decoration, editor R O'Donnell (Gracewing, 2004) £12.99
Get this book
About Pugin
The following publications are available from the Pugin Society see the society's website for further details.
Pugin in his Home: Two memoirs by John Hardman Powell, edited with an introduction by Alexandra Wedgwood (The Pugin Society, Thanet District Council, 2006) £4
A Flint Seaside Church: St Augustine's Abbey Church, Ramsgate by Libby Horner and Gill Hunter (The Pugin Society, 2000) £5
True Principles journal and Present State newsletter The Pugin Society journal, True Principles, appears once a year. It is edited by Timothy Brittain-Catlin, who featured in the Time Team programme on Pugin. The society also publishes a newsletter, Present State.
Benjamin Ferrey on Pugin
The book by Benjamin Ferrey referred to by The God of Gothic director Brendan Hughes in Time Team in Pugin-land was first published in 1861 as Recollections of A N Welby Pugin and his father Augustus Pugin. The most recent version was published as Recollections of Pugin (Scholar Press, 1978).
Get this book
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third-party sites.
The Pugin Society
www.pugin-society.org
To be a member of the Pugin Society, according to its website, is to be someone who, as Pugin said of his wife Jane, 'perfectly understands and delights in spires, chancels, screens, stained windows, brasses, vestments, etc.' The society's website contains information about membership, publications, a list of Pugin's buildings and news about buildings at risk.
The Landmark Trust
www.landmarktrust.co.uk
Pugin's former home at The Grange, Ramsgate, is now owned by the Landmark Trust. The Trust has now completed the restoration, as seen in the Time Team Special. As with other Landmark Trust properties, The Grange is available to rent for holidays, and can also be visited by appointment.
The Victorian Society
www.victoriansociety.org.uk
Founded in the 1950s, the Victorian Society pioneered the re-evaluation of Victorian architecture and design in the latter half of the 20th century and campaigns vigorously for the preservation of Victorian buildings.
The Victorian Web
www.victorianweb.org
Definitive resource on all things Victorian with articles and the occasional timeline on philosophy, religion, science, technology, the arts, political and social history, gender matters and much more.
At the age of just 15, Pugin was hired to do what?
Design furniture for Windsor Castle
What did Pugin do in 1834 that he regarded as the most important decision in his life?
Converted to Catholicism
Which of Pugin's designs was the only one that he said had not been curtailed by financial considerations?
The Grange at Ramsgate
Pugin was very fond of sailing and the sea throughout his life, and was shipwrecked off Leith in 1830. What did he usually wear that represented this interest?
A sailor's jacket
Where was Pugin sent for a short period in 1852 as a result of mental illness?
The Bedlam asylum
Which of the following, now a popular amusement park, was designed by Pugin?
Alton Towers