IN THE SUMMER OF 1852 A 40-year-old man was in a secure room in Bethlem Hospital for the Insane; he recognised no one, not even his wife; his head had been shaved, and he had become what was described as “very dirty in his habits”. This was the man who, six months before, had designed the clock tower now known as Big Ben. His name was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

Pugin was a child of the early 19th century. Like his exact contemporary, Charles Dickens, he was filled to overflowing with energy and ebullient inventiveness. He could never stop. He lived in a whirlwind of his own making. He started work on design at the age of nine in the employment of his father, a French émigré who specialised in architectural draughtsmanship. By the time he was 15 Pugin was designing furniture for George IV. With impetuous ardour he moved from project to project.

Yet all the time he was nourishing his own particular vision. Or, rather, it was emerging within him without his necessarily being aware of it. That can happen with visions –they catch the visionary unawares. At the age of 20, at any rate, Pugin had discovered an idealised Gothic or medieval style that would stay with him in various incarnations for the rest of his short life.

It is hard to explain the passion of the Victorians for reconstructed or restored medievalism. Yet it exists in every quarter of 19th-century culture – in Morris, Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin, Rossetti and many other writers and artists. It may be connected with the 19th-century yearning for idealised female innocence and infantine purity. It was a yearning for that which was being destroyed by the forces of the age – in the case of the medieval period, a nostalgia for the old order of society in which authority and hierarchy were enshrined. Pugin, as a young man, was living on the edge of a world of change. In the fields of theology, geology, science and natural philosophy the conventional assumptions were about to be overturned for ever.

So Pugin became entranced by the permanence and stability embodied in the Gothic style of workmanship. It offered a symbol of veneration in an age when there was very little left to venerate. In the Gothic style Pugin found in the very fabric of the stone the tokens of the divine, the outward sign of inward grace.

There may also have been a more private cause for his attachment. In this excellent and detailed biography, Rosemary Hill reveals that the Pugin family believed that it held a medieval title to European nobility that had been conveniently forgotten or destroyed at the time of the French Revolution. It was now possible to claim back a coat of arms. In extolling the Gothic style Pugin may have been creating an origin and context for his own insistent and passionate identity that might otherwise break apart.

So Pugin threw himself into the medieval project. Before he reached the age of 30 he had designed 22 churches, three cathedrals, half a dozen grand houses and a Cistercian monastery. His role had spiritual, as well as architectural, consequences. Before he had even embarked on his great building programme, he told a friend: “I can assure you after a most close and impartial investigation I feel perfectly convinced that the roman Catholick church is the only true one – and the only one in which the grand & sublime style of church architecture can ever be restored.”

He never wavered in his Faith, despite severe disappointment and even conflict with many of his co-religion-ists. He had entered the hothouse of English Catholicism, in which many strange fruit were reared. There was, for example, a division between the old Catholics – what might be called the indigenous Catholics – and the new converts who were more dedicated to Roman Catholicism than to English Catholicism. They were more Roman than the Pope, and twice as vociferous. With all the ardour of his nature Pugin threw himself into religious controversies, on the side of the indigenous faith, and suffered obloquy as a result. Why should he not support the English cause? He wanted to build churches, after all, in the style of the reign of Edward I.

As a result of his efforts he almost single-handedly popularised the Gothic style in England. He can be considered the master spirit, if not the master builder, of all the multifarious banks, public offices and railway stations that rose up in the towns and cities of the country. He had something else on his side, too. He was for a while part of what was then known as the spirit of the age. There was a fashion for chivalric tournaments and for plain chant, for quatrefoil tracery and for Arthurian epic poetry. In retrospect it may seem the merest play-acting but, uniquely, Pugin’s architecture has survived as a genuine statement of religious faith. Of course Pugin always loved the theatre, and worked for a while as a stage designer, but the element of theatricality in his work can be forgiven. Even if he had a passion for the grand and inclusive gesture, he never lost his eye for detail. His interior work on the rebuilt Houses of Parliament, thankless and poorly paid as it turned out to be for him, is more than evidence for that. It represents his most famous achievement.

In the end he wore himself out, working beyond his strength. His continual application and industry provoked in him a severe nervous depression. He was physically almost constantly ill in his last years, suffering from fever and failing eyesight, and he said that he had lived 60 years in less than 40. He felt “lonely and abandoned and miserable” and would often “cry for hours like a child”. In the end his exhaustion proved too much, and he lapsed into a mania from which he recovered only for a few days before his death. He had done too much. He had changed the face of England for ever. This book can be recommended for its disciplined but convincing championship of the most important English architect of the 19th century.

God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain by Rosemary Hill

Allen Lane, £30; 624pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £27 (free p&p)

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