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Pugin’s Churches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Rosemary Hill
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Extract

This article is intended as a companion to ‘Pugin’s Small Houses’ published here three years ago. It follows the same method, tracing the development of Pugin’s ideas about a single building type over the course of his career by way of the most significant examples. It would be impractical to discuss every church, and in assessing significance I have considered how relevant a particular building may be to the overall direction of Pugin’s thinking. Some major buildings, such as St Barnabas, Nottingham, are touched on only briefly because little or nothing followed directly from them. By the same token a relatively minor work, such as St Wilfred’s Hulme, may in this context be revealing. At times it will be necessary to discuss Pugin’s work in other building types.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 49 , 2006 , pp. 179 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2006

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References

Notes

1 Architectural History, 46 (2003), pp. 147–74.

2 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Early Victorian Architecture in Britain (New Haven, 1954)Google Scholar.

3 Stanton, Phoebe, Pugin (London, 1971)Google Scholar.

4 Richardson, Douglas Scott, Gothic Revival Architecture in Ireland (New York and London, 1983)Google Scholar.

5 O’Donnell, Roderick, ‘Pugin as a Church Architect,’ in Pugin a Gothic Passion, eds Atterbury, Paul and Wainwright, Clive (New Haven and London, 1994), pp. 63–90 Google Scholar.

6 Creating a Gothic Paradise, Pugin at the Antipodes, ed. Brian Andrews (Hobart 2002).

7 There are many valuable guide books and histories for individual churches as well as some independent studies. Those from which I have chiefly drawn information are: Champ, Judith, Oscott College Chapel (Oscott, 2002)Google Scholar; Fisher, Michael, ‘Perfect Cheadle’, St Giles Catholic church, Cheadle, Staffordshire (Stafford, 2004)Google Scholar; Hodgetts, Michael, St Chad’s Birmingham (Birmingham, 1987)Google Scholar; Newman, John, St Augustine’s Ramsgate as a Kentish church (Ramsgate, 1996)Google Scholar; Derek, and Thakray, Lucy, A Brief History of St Marie’s Church, 1844–1986 (Rugby, 1987)Google Scholar.

8 Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, p. 72.

9 Ibid., p. 78.

10 Edinburgh Catholic Magazine, 2 (1838), pp. 1–2.

11 Hitchcock suggests (Early Victorian Architecture, p. 64) that Pugin’s first ecclesiastical buildings were the chapels at Mount St Bernard and Whitwick in Leicestershire for Ambrose Phillipps consecrated in October 1837, but there is no evidence of any contact between Pugin and Phillipps before November 1837. It seems likely that these chapels, like the one in Phillipps’s house consecrated at the same time, were by William Railton.

12 Edinburgh Catholic Magazine, 2 (1838), p. 1.

13 It has been suggested (Andrew Saint, ‘St Chad’s, Birmingham: not so very foreign?’, True Principles, 3: 2, p. 70) that Pugin’s design for Birmingham was based on Reculver Abbey, Kent. Pugin himself, however, is specific: ‘I have adopted a foreign style of pointed architecture because it is both cheap and effective and Likewise because it is totally different from any protestant errection [sic]’ (Letter to John Hardman senior [10 June 1837, The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, ed. Margaret Belcher (Oxford, 2001), 1, pp. 77–78]). The similarity of phrasing in this letter to the explanation in the Catholic Magazine suggests that the report, like others in the same periodical, was either written by or closely based on information supplied by Pugin.

14 Letter to E. J. Willson, 22 August 1834, Letters, 1, p. 38.

15 Catholic Magazine, 3 (1839), p. 629. Once again, since the article is accompanied by Pugin’s own illustrations, it is suggested that it was he who supplied the information which is very detailed.

16 See Hill, Rosemary, ‘Reformation to Millennium: Pugin’s Contrasts in the History of English Thought’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 58: 1 (March 1999), pp. 26–41 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Letter from Pugin to ‘my dear Lord bishop’, probably Nicholas Wiseman, n.d., c. 1850, MS in private collection, microfilm in the House of Lords Record Office, HOLRO/304/126.

18 Stanton, Pugin, p. 68.

19 Letter from Pugin to Wiseman, n.d., c. early January 1839, Letters, I, p. 106.

20 Pugin, A. W., ‘Chancel of St Marie’s Uttoxeter’, Orthodox Journal, 9, 20 July 1839, pp. 33–36 (p. 33)Google Scholar.

21 Hitchcock, , Early Victorian Architecture, p. 72 Google Scholar.

22 Letter from Pugin to Richard Pierce, n.d., c. 22 June 1839, Letters, I, pp. 118–19.

23 Letter from Pugin to Daniel Rock, 4 March 1840, Letters, 1, pp. 133–34.

24 Ibid.

25 See, inter alia, two sources that Pugin certainly knew: John Milner, ‘Letter from the RevMilner, John M.A. F.S.A. to Mr Taylor’, in Essays on Gothic Architecture, 2nd edn (London, 1802), pp. xxii–xxiii Google Scholar; and Britton, John and Pugin, A. C., The Architectural Antiquities of Normandy, 2nd edn (London, 1833), p. 21 Google Scholar.

26 Pugin, Contrasts (Salisbury, 1836), p. 5.

27 The British Critic, 21 (1837), pp. 334–35.

28 For more details of this view of architecture, inherited from the Stuart antiquaries, see Hill, ‘Reformation to Millennium’.

29 The British Critic, 21 (1837), pp. 334–35.

30 Letter from Pugin to E. J. Willson, 9 June 1839, Letters, I, pp. 116–17.

31 The British Critic, 25 (1839), p. 481.

32 Ibid, p. 490.

33 Ibid. This of course was a typical nineteenth-century Picturesque belief. It is now apparent that medieval architects were in fact interested in achieving symmetry.

34 Letter from Pugin to John Rouse Bloxam, 13 September 1840, Letters, 1, pp. 142–47.

35 Pugin, , The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (London 1841)Google Scholar; and Pugin, , Contrasts: or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; shewing the present decay of taste, 2nd edn (Charles Dolman, London, 1841)Google Scholar.

36 ‘Elevation of the Cathedral Church of St Chad, Birmingham’, Dublin Review, 20 (May 1841).

37 The British Critic, 29 (January 1841), pp. 1–44 and pp. 44–70 (two separate articles).

38 The British Critic, 28 (October 1840), pp. 471–522.

39 ‘Elevation of the Cathedral Church of St Chad, Birmingham’, subsequently published in A. Welby Pugin, On the Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England (London, 1843), p. 18.

40 See for example the description of St Wilfred Hulme in Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England, South Lancashire (London, 1969), p. 331.

41 Letter from Pugin to the Earl of Shrewsbury, 5 January, 1841, Letters, 1, pp. 187–89.

42 SirScott, George Gilbert, with an introduction by Stamp, Gavin, Personal and Professional Recollections (Stamford, 1995), p. 87 Google Scholar.

43 Dublin Review, 23 (February 1842); and Pugin, The Present State.

44 O’Donnell, Roderick, ‘blink [him] by silence? The Cambridge Camden Society and A. W. N. Pugin’, in ‘A church as it should be’ The Cambridge Camden Society and Its Influence, ed. Webster, Christopher and Elliott, John (Stamford, 2000), pp. 98–120 Google Scholar. The phrase from which the title is taken occurs at the beginning of a long review of the newly completed St George’s Southwark and St John’s Salford. Its meaning in context is the opposite of that which is implied: ‘This is undoubtedly a noticeable event, and we should be but cowardly and unconfiding members of our own beloved communion if we were to attempt to blink it by silence’ (‘New Roman Catholic Churches’, Ecclesiologist, 9 (London, 1849), pp. 151–64).

45 Letter to Hardman, n.d., c. 1850, MS in a private collection, microfilm in the House of Lords Record Office, HOLRO/309/775; it seems unlikely Pugin ever discovered that Hope was the author of the attack on him.

46 For a more detailed account of this process, see Hill, Rosemary, ‘Pugin’s Small Houses’, and Rosemary Hill, ‘Ruskin and Pugin’, in Ruskin & Architecture, ed. Daniels, Rebecca and Brandwood, Geoffrey (Reading, 2003), pp. 222–45 Google Scholar.

47 Pugin, , An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (London, 1843), p. 15 Google Scholar.

48 Pugin, The Present State, p. 97.

49 Pugin, Apology, p. 38.

50 Ibid., p. 50.

51 Thompson, Paul, William Butterfield (London, 1971)Google Scholar.

52 Diary of Benjamin Webb, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.misc.e406, fol. 54V.

53 Pugin, Apology, p. 55.

54 See Hill, ‘Pugin’s Small Houses’.

55 Hitchcock, , Early Victorian Architecture, p. 144 Google Scholar.

56 Letter to an unnamed correspondent, possibly Bishop Sharpies, n.d., c. 1845, Liverpool Diocesan Archives, RCLV/63.

57 See Hill, ‘Pugin’s Small Houses’.

58 Knight, Richard Payne, An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste (London, 1805), p. 174 Google Scholar.

59 Letter to Thomas Griffiths, 27 October 1844, Margaret Belcher (ed.), Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, Volume 2 1843–1845 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 265–66.

60 Newman, St Augustine’s Ramsgate.

61 Although Pugin later repudiated the decoration of St Giles in Some Remarks …on The Rambler (London, 1850) and blamed the Earl of Shrewsbury for it, there is no evidence that he objected at the time, as he did to many of his patron’s suggestions. Moreover, Pugin published Floriated Ornament, a book of designs for stencilling, in 1849. His insistence a year later that ‘as for stencilled walls I dislike them exceedingly’ (Some Remarks, p. 9) would seem to be another of his sudden changes of mind.

62 Ecclesiologist, 9 (1849), p. 369.

63 Newman, St Augustine’s, Ramsgate, p. 6.

64 Ecclesiologist, 9 (1849), p. 370.

65 Ibid.

66 Ecclesiologist, 5 (1846), pp. 10–16.

67 Ibid., pp. 48–53.

68 Ibid., p. 10.

69 Ibid., p. 11.

70 John Elliott, ‘Pugin, St Osmund and Salisbury’, in Ecclesiology Today (April 2000), pp. 2–8 (p. 6).

71 Ecclesiologist, 11 (1850), pp. 227–33.

72 Ecclesiologist, 10 (1850), pp. 393–99 (p. 395).

73 Letter to John Hardman, see above n. 45.

74 This plausible suggestion was made in conversation by Andrew Saint.

75 Letter to John Rouse Bloxam, n.d., post-marked 17 December 1850, MS Magdalen College, Oxford, 528/152.

76 Pugin, , A Treatise on Chancel Screens (London, 1851), p. 120 Google Scholar.