Religious fanatics are out of favour just now, so it is good to be reminded how much we owe them. Augustus Pugin, the architect of the gothic revival, altered the look of towns and cities across Britain and designed the clock-tower of Big Ben, the symbol of our parliamentary democracy. Yet he was unmistakably a religious fanatic, displaying both the ardent sense of mission and the frail grasp of reality that authentic fanaticism requires. He dreamt of turning Victorian Britain into a Roman Catholic kingdom, and reinstating the social and political arrangements of the Middle Ages, a historical period about which he was at best hazily informed.

Rosemary Hill’s magnificent biography, as sumptuous and intricate as anything Pugin built, contrasts his small beginnings with his prodigious achievement. His father was a French drawing master, the son of a footman; his mother, an English gentlewoman, prone, like her son, to passionate and hysterical enthusiasms.

A treasured only child, he had virtually no formal education. He never learnt to spell, and remained unaware of the Renaissance until quite late in life. But he was intensely drilled in the things that mattered for his success. While other boys were at school, he was exploring the medieval buildings of England and Normandy with his parents and honing his graphic skills. The Middle Ages were all the rage, thanks to Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, and Pugin père was keen to exploit the popular taste. Trained by him, Pugin always carried little leather-bound books on his travels, which he filled with rapidly drawn details of medieval carving or tracery and scenes from illuminated manuscripts, copied in water-colour and gold. These became the database for his architectural designs, as well as for his gorgeously patterned carpets, textiles, wallpapers and stained glass.

In the aftermath of the revolution there was a flourishing market in antiquities ransacked from French churches, and even a 12-year-old’s pocket money, Hill reckons, could buy world-class works of medieval art. Pugin later acquired a cargo boat in which to smuggle the spoils of the church-looters across the channel. He helped to select artworks, many of them his own designs, for what was to be the Victoria and Albert Museum, and it mounted an unforgettable Pugin retrospective in 1994.

His other inspiration was the theatre. His doting parents converted the top floor of their house into a model theatre where he could try out his designs, removing the attic ceilings so as to install cisterns for water effects. Rather unreasonably, they were upset when he started hanging around Covent Garden, and got a job as a scene painter. He liked the company of actors, and the first two of his three wives were theatre dancers. Hill traces a strong resemblance between the arrangement of flats and arches on the Covent Garden stage and his plans for churches. This makes sense, because religion for him was largely play-acting, consisting of solemn processions and ceremonies. He designed flowing medieval-style chasubles for the priests in his churches (there was a frightful fuss when the Holy See found out), and signed his letters with a cross as if he were a bishop. In the same thespian spirit he liked wearing sailor’s costume. The first house he built for his family, located in the peaceful suburbs of Salisbury, was really a stage-set out of the Waverley novels, with turreted fortifications, a moat and a drawbridge.

He was phenomenally precocious. His first commission, at 15, was to design gothic dining chairs for George IV at Windsor Castle. They needed two footmen to lift them. There was something manic about his energy. A friend recalled how he would rush by, talking agitatedly to himself, and likened it to being mown down by a fire engine. In the two years from 1838 to 1840, he built or designed 18 churches, two cathedrals, three convents, two monasteries and several schools. The money came from wealthy Catholic patrons, notably the Earl of Shrewsbury, Britain’s most prominent Catholic layman, who created a gothic mansion at Alton Towers resembling a succession of scenes from Ivanhoe, complete with a blind harper. (Appropriately, its site is now Britain’s most famous theme park).

Pugin adopted his patrons’ aristocratic politics, siding with the landed interest in opposing the repeal of the corn laws, even though it would relieve widespread starvation. But his illusion of class-solidarity was shaken when he proposed marriage to a young cousin of Shrewsbury’s who was deeply in love with him. Her scandalised parents intervened, and she entered a nunnery. Unenlightened, he proposed to another highborn damsel a couple of years later, with similarly humiliating results. In both cases, he was the victim of his own naivety, and it was the same in his professional life. Being a fanatic, he was driven by pure belief, not personal gain, which meant that he could be exploited by ruthless careerists. Charles Barry, the architect of the Palace of Westminster, treated him shamefully, depending on him entirely for the interior decoration of the building – Pugin did 1,000 drawings for the House of Lords alone – but scanting his remuneration and excluding his name from the published list of his assistants. That Big Ben was Pugin’s design was hushed up.

Compared to the Shrewsburys and Barrys of this world, Pugin was obviously a warmly likable human being, and his genius as a designer is beyond question. It is only his idea of religion that seems strange. The notion that God has a particular fondness for pointed arches, or prefers medieval-style encaustic tiles to other types of flooring, seems, at least to a Protestant or agnostic mind, simply ridiculous. Yet this was Pugin’s fervent conviction. The belief that the gothic was a sacred style, infused with divine truth, transformed his life, Hill tells us. Her book’s epigraph is taken from The Prelude, where Wordsworth records how he imagined there was life and feeling even in “the loose stones that cover the highway”. The implication is that Pugin and Wordsworth were rather alike. But, in fact, they were polar opposites. Wordsworth’s enthusiasm for the French revolution and passion for wild nature contrast with Pugin’s horror of civil unrest and indifference to the natural world. Worship, for Wordsworth, did not happen in gothic churches but “There where the roar of mighty torrents fills / The sky-roofed temple of the eternal hills”. Placed beside the grandeur of that vision, Pugin’s religion of chasubles and rood screens shrivels into trivial aestheticism.

Come to that, the transformation of British architecture that he and his imitators effected can seem pure fakery. Making banks, offices and insurance companies look like medieval religious buildings disguised their real purpose, just as giving a rich coating of gothic to the interior of the House of Lords conferred a spurious dignity on the hereditary dunderheads who sat in it. But these considerations do not make the story Hill tells any less enthralling or illuminating, or Pugin’s descent into madness and his early death (from syphilis, contracted in his theatrical days, Hill thinks) any less tragic. Unlike Barry he was not interred in Westminster Abbey, but this book is a properly glorious monument.

Grand designs

Pugin is the architect who shaped us: we owe him the patterned floor tiles of our red brick Victorian houses, the pitched roofs of our municipal libraries, the high arched windows of our schools and railway stations – not to mention Big Ben. All bear the mark of his belief that the gothic style embodies a divine reality. In Pugin’s 1836 book Contrasts, he blames the evils of society on the Reformation. His argument owed more to passion than to knowledge – amazingly, he had never even heard of the Renaissance – but the book spelt the effective end of Georgian architecture. A new era had begun.

GOD’S ARCHITECT: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain by Rosemary Hill
Allen Lane £30 pp616
Buy the book here at the offer price of £27 (inc p&p)

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