On 12 September 1852, the Duke of Wellington, by that time the closest any Briton had come to being deemed a living demigod, died. The response was dramatic, almost, to judge by his juggernaut of a catafalque, biblical; no question of ‘Sind Donner, sind Blitze in Wolken verschwunden?’ For another national notable, however, thunder and lightning had indeed disappeared in the clouds. So much mournful word-froth had swept away, to the back pages of the papers, the announcement of another death on the same day. At the unripe age of 40, less than half that of the old Iron Duke, the country’s most zealous, if not most well-known, and certainly not most well-regarded architect, decorator and designer had departed in unpublicised peace. Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was abandoned to oblivion: buried under the hero’s ‘monstrous bronze mass’ of a bier.
Thomas Carlyle’s words summarily evoke those bathetic funeral arrangements. And today, the word Waterloo conjures more images of 1974 Eurovision and delayed trains than Wellington’s world-altering victory. Downstream from that train station, however, the clock tower of Big Ben is known to everyone. Like Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, if such an allusion may be allowed, it is effective because it is simple; a simplicity that belies nimbly handled depths of meaning. It summarises, in one deft architectural expression, parliamentary democracy, constitutional monarchy, the ancient rights of Magna Carta, Britain itself. It was one of the last buildings Pugin designed, scribbled on the back of a piece of paper and dispatched from Ramsgate to London, where the building’s principal architect, Charles Barry, pocketed the drawing and – for too long, at least – the credit.
To say Pugin was at odds with the times he lived in is so obvious as to be clichéd. Yet, he bequeathed his vision for a muscular, morally driven, not to say modern, Gothic architecture not only directly to the Victorians, but to us. The proto-Modernist principles of his truth-to-materials functionalism may have been overstated, but up and down the country suburbia is cloaked in Pugin garb: exposed brick, proud chimney stacks, protruding bay windows, hallways lined in encaustic tiles – all Pugin. Neither is his presence confined to the realm of middle-class domesticity. From the terraced house up to the temple – it is doubtful whether a single parish church in the country does not contain a piece of Pugin – he sprawls across all civic life: every letter sent by an MP is topped with a crowned portcullis of Puginian invention; the monarch himself announces government policy from a Pugin-designed throne. Not bad for a niche, idiosyncratic outsider.
If the 19th century moved by committee men, public meetings and society dinners, Pugin was once more contra mundum. When presenting his plans for a cathedral to quizzical sponsors and stakeholders, he was known to roll up his drawings and flounce out with a ‘whoever heard of a cathedral being built in a year?’ Contrasts, his infamous dismantling of contemporary architecture, weighed Britain’s buildings and society in the balance, and found them both wanting. In the 1830s he converted to Catholicism, which, as his biographer Rosemary Hill observed, was as transgressive as coming out as a Communist in the 1930s. Around him he gathered a robustly talented, if ragtag, gang of collaborators. Herbert Minton manufactured his tiles and ceramics, John Crace was his decorator and furniture-maker, George Meyers brought his buildings to bricks-and-mortar life, John Hardman realised all of his other designs for metal and stained glass. They were the four horsemen of his Belshazzar apocalypse. But Pugin led the charge.
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Nobody galloped faster. ‘You have plenty of fleur-de-lis but if you can’t get them right… I will draw them out for the 50,000th time,’ he goaded. It is this relationship with ‘my dear Hardman’ in particular that is evidenced in the 703 designs Pugin made for John Hardman & Co acquired in 2023 by the Victoria and Albert Museum, a selection of which are on display there until October 2025. In Pugin’s fluid working drawings, summarily sketchy and sparingly annotated, a collaborative affinity emerges. Changing the world one fleur-de-lis at a time, they worked their way through chalices and chasubles, iron benches and umbrella stands. All was to be made new – that is, old. Most of all, the drawings reveal a deep humanity and humour in design: punctuated by personal loss, as in the touching nautical tombstone he designed for the ‘Poor Spaniard’ who attended mass at his church in Ramsgate; the giddy heights of public success, such as ‘the morning star of the great revival’ that was the Palace of Westminster; and, at least once, the pawprints of Hardman’s workshop cat.
Alongside such feline interventions, the drawings evidence the dirt, dust and wear and tear of the studio. Exhibited in two rooms adjacent to the museum’s stained-glass and silverwork displays, alongside examples of his finished candlesticks, plates and tiles, these incomplete technical studies hardly convey the rich, heraldic tincture of Pugin’s vivid, Gothic imagination. Red rescues the rooms. Souped up in tomato tones, the walls are heightened by glitteringly gilded text and vertically hung pink wallpaper borders embellished with Pugin’s personal martlet emblem (a footless heraldic bird; restless, like the man himself) and Hardman’s company monogram. Appropriately, it’s the same shade of gules (heraldically speaking) Pugin used to decorate the plinths and draperies at the Medieval Court that he spearheaded at the Great Exhibition — which was, after all, the progenitor of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
He was dead within a year. A quarter of a century earlier, his career had begun with fiddly Strawberry Hill Gothic furniture for Windsor Castle. Through a deep engagement with the Medieval sources, he expelled the fanciful fragrarian flourishes, recasting them for budding Victorian tastes. The Gothic Revival had come of age. To the long cast of Wellington’s shadow, however, was added the ungenerous assessment of John Ruskin, who labelled Pugin ‘one of the smallest possible or conceivable architects’. If small, he stood on his Medieval finials as on the shoulders of giants: Pugin’s legacy remains of undoubted relevance. Prodigious inventiveness, singleminded creativity, all-encompassing vision; art as life, work as Gesamtkunstwerk: all this his drawings substantiate. Most significantly, in an era of parallel technological advance and comparable aesthetic nostalgia, is his ability to engage with the past and reinvent it as apposite and new. Not for nothing was his motto en avant (onwards). ‘The history book on the shelf,’ as a certain song about Waterloo recalls, ‘is always repeating itself.’
‘Makers of Modern Gothic: AWN Pugin and John Hardman Jr’ runs until October 2025 at the Victoria and Albert Museum. For more information, visit vam.ac.uk.
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