Pugin’s rood screen in rude health

On August 15 1850, Augustus Welby Pugin exclaimed in a letter to his friend John Hardman: “I am full of anxiety and work.” That very day had seen the consecration of the church he had built next to his house in Ramsgate. “Everything about this building goes wrong,” he complained.

It was because Pugin cared so much about this church that everything seemed to fall short. One outburst of frustration came when, at the last moment, another collaborator, John Gregory Crace, sent the wrong kind of textile to be draped in the chancel for the first solemn service of Benediction. Instead of a pattern of medieval fleurs de lys, he’d got parlour roses. But in the event, the effect was “very good”, with the canopy, candles, and I suppose incense smoke, visible through the lovely carved wooden chancel screen of tracery panels over ogee arches.

Pugin had a thing about screens in churches, marking off the holy area of the chancel. He made them a shibboleth of “true” Gothic architecture. They led him into ludicrously fierce denunciations of the blameless John Henry Newman and his fellow Oratorians, who favoured Italian Baroque for their churches in England. Pugin was on weak ground here, since no old churches in Rome, whose religion he put before anything, were Gothic, with the famous exception of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

But on home territory Pugin knew what he was about. The strongest grounds of his unnecessary feud with John Ruskin was that Ruskin had built nothing. “The chancel is such a thing,” he wrote of his own St Augustine’s, Ramsgate. “It really atones for almost everything – it looks so solemn.” Pugin was still only 38, but he had made the Gothic of the early 14th century a language to express complicated relations of space and surface ornament. In another letter to Hardman (in Margaret Belcher’s tremendous five-volume edition, completed this year) Pugin boasted that he was quite prepared to forgo architectural commissions, but “by the holy Rood what I do shall be good”.

And none was better than St Augustine’s. Its best fittings were displayed at the wildly popular Medieval Court at the Great Exhibition of 1851, including the stone spired tabernacle. That piece of work is now in the Harvard chapel at Southwark Anglican cathedral, which took it in after regrettable reordering at St Augustine’s in the 1970s.

Some of that is about to be put right after the excellent news of a Lottery Heritage Fund grant of £810,000. In the past five years, with the Rev Marcus Holden as Rector, the church has been transformed. For a start it is now open every day. There is even a relic of St Augustine of Canterbury, donated by the Fathers of the Oratory about whom Pugin had been so rude.

Lord LloydWebber has backed the restoration and his foundation has donated £25,000. “I’m looking forward to seeing the St Augustine’s rood screen and chancel restored to Pugin’s original design,” he commented.

The screen, above which was the crucifix or “rood” by which Pugin swore, was a few years ago folded round the altar in the Lady Chapel (pictured), in an ingenious piece of work by the late Roderick Gradidge, the designer of pub interiors, who sported a long pigtail and often a black pleated skirt.

It would indeed be good to have it in the position Pugin intended. In a friendly rant to John Hardman earlier in 1850, Pugin inveighed against a church screen that lacked doors as “a sham, disgraceful”. He predicted: “When you see my chancel you will say you have never before seen a chancel.” As John Newman observed in his revision of Pevsner’s volume for Kent, the interior of St Augustine’s is “a marvel”. It is good that so many people now care for it.