Pugin’s Gothic vision for the age of steam
In a hurry as always, the Gothic architect AWN Pugin wrote to his friend John Hardman one day in 1845: “I send you the size of the plug from my washbasin. Do you think it better be plated or of some metal that will not verdigris?”
Pugin was building himself a house at Ramsgate beside a church, St Augustine’s, of his own design. We can see them both today.
I was thinking about Pugin because I’ve just watched a 15-minute video Discovering St Augustine’s, narrated by Alastair Stewart. We see the altars, the soaring carved font cover, the wrought iron gates to the Lady chapel, all closely configured in an interior that Pugin designed.
The church looks better than for many a year, thanks to the energetic spirituality of the Rector, Father Marcus Holden, and others. Pugin’s beloved medieval carved openwork wooden screen has been restored to its rightful place between nave and chancel, marking off the sacred enclosure for the altar without concealing it.
Pugin thought that the Gothic style met the “true principles” of Christian architecture. But, as the remark about the plug (quoted by Rosemary Hilll in her biography of Pugin, God’s Architect) shows, his overriding concern was that things functioned well. He chose to have plate glass in his house at Ramsgate rather than leaded Gothic panes, in order to secure a sea view. He copied nothing from the Middle Ages “merely because it is old”.
Hardman’s factory in Birmingham produced the metalwork and glass to the designs of Pugin, who left him much leeway to manufacture them in as practical a way as he wished. He gladly used die punches and electro-forming (laying down metal over a pattern in a bath of electrolyte).
It was a similar story with Herbert Minton, to whose floor tiles Pugin gave a great boost by ordering them for the new Houses of Parliament. They were later to be used at St George’s Hall, Liverpool, and other municipal palaces.
Minton achieved for Pugin the revival of the medieval art of so-called encaustic tile-making. It relied upon different coloured clays being inlaid to produce the desired design – a fleur-de-lis or, on Pugin’s own tiles, a shield with a legless martlet (which never rests). But Minton happily used hydraulic power to stamp his designs.
Pugin made a big impression at the Great Exhibition of 1851 with his Medieval Court. No doubt medieval craftsmen would have been delighted by the wonders of electrolysis and hydraulics. But Pugin differed in his attitude to skilled labour from John Ruskin in the next wave of Gothic enthusiasm. Ruskin treasured an arts and crafts notion of autonomy for the artisan. He did so with some sacrifice of realism. Pugin’s ideas were closely informed by his unrelenting need for things to be made. Ruskin, although he set up an idealistic society of artistic socialist bent, had no such practical projects beyond drawing and writing.
Pugin’s church at Ramsgate is simple, even austere on the outside. Its hard glassy walls of dark cut flint have no tangle of crockets, gargoyles or flying buttresses. So, what was the essence of the Gothic style by which he set such store?
In a long, defensive letter to The Tablet in 1850, he boiled the Gothic style down to this: “The Christian use of the pointed arch, which owes its adoption in ecclesiastical architecture to the desire of symbolising the mystery of the resurrection by vertical lines and height.”
That mystery, principally as expressed in the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, is served by everything that Pugin left us at St Augustine’s, Ramsgate.