Pugin: God's Own Architect

Britain has many iconic buildings,

but when it comes to buildings that are an icon of Britain itself,

there's one that stands head and shoulders above the rest.

The clock tower of Big Ben.

Built just over 150 years ago,

it's meant to evoke a Medieval land of chivalry and honour.

Its design harks back to the Middle Ages,

but it's not out of place in the 21st century.

You'd think that the man who designed it

would be a household name

but Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin

has drifted into relative obscurity.

He was half-French but had a moral vision for Britain.

He wanted to change the nation through architecture.

The Gothic Revival that he inspired

transformed our landscape.

He died aged just 40,

but his influence stretches from almshouses at one extreme

to the Palace of Westminster at the other.

And he still inspires the hi-tech architects of today.

And yet, he's scarcely recognised.

I think it's time we reassessed the legacy

of this devout and complicated man.

I want to show you that like Darwin, Dickens, Brunel, Turner,

Pugin deserves to be considered

one of the greats of 19th-century Britain.

Born in 1812, Pugin grew up in Georgian Britain.

It was a time with its own enduring version of England -

Regency houses and Georgian terraces.

For me, Georgian architecture is the epitome of elegance.

It's graceful, light, it's beautifully proportioned,

but for Pugin it was an abomination,

and the reason was politics.

In the 1830s, Britain was in the throes of a revolution,

the Industrial Revolution.

But while the mill owners got rich,

the workers flooding into the cities lived in disease-ridden slums.

This inequality fed social unrest

and Pugin feared it would bring revolution

of an entirely different kind,

according to Rosemary Hill, his biographer.

We forget that in the early 1830s

there was the worst civil unrest that this country has ever seen.

Many people thought there would be a revolution.

Many people had a general sense

that the end of civilisation was approaching.

In Pugin's eyes, the times called for strong moral leadership,

but what they got was George IV.

Viewed as a hedonistic dilettante, cartoons like this

reflect the widespread contempt in which the king was held.

And his detractors took the same dim view of Georgian architecture.

While the slums were proliferating,

the king and his favourite architect John Nash

lavished a fortune on buildings like Buckingham Palace.

But these classically-styled edifices

were often highly deceptive.

Many were just one room deep,

their long facades giving a false impression of size.

Look at these buildings through Pugin's eyes

and they start to fall apart in your hands.

The columns that don't actually hold anything up at all.

The stuccoed front -

designed to look like stone but that's just covering up brick.

These buildings were all fur coat and no knickers,

they look great but there's often very little behind them.

To the people of the time,

they were everything that was rotten with the king and his court.

They were frivolous, they were foolish and they were spendthrift.

But to Pugin they were more than that.

They were a physical symbol of moral degeneracy.

Just 24 and full of youthful contempt for the Establishment,

Pugin launched an astonishing literary attack

on this stucco-fronted society.

First published in 1836, he called it...

Contrasts.

One of the things I love about Contrasts

is how thoroughly rude it is.

It doesn't hold back its punches in any way.

The National Gallery, Buckingham Palace,

the British Museum -

to us models of elegance,

to Pugin an absolute "disgrace".

This book is like an early recording of Elvis or punk rock

and it tells you that everything you think you know is wrong.

It's aggressive, it's funny, it's satirical,

but it's not just the work of an angry young man.

It has a moral vision at its heart.

It tells you the way the world used to be

and the way the world could be again.

And it's going to capture its moral vision in architecture.

For Pugin, the Britain of the Middle Ages

was an idealised, more moral age

and that morality was reflected in its soaring Gothic architecture.

So throughout Contrasts, Pugin puts the boot into

the immorality and shoddy buildings of Regency Britain

in contrast to its Medieval past.

Pugin's view in Contrasts was to say to his contemporaries,

"We have shoddy buildings because we have shoddy souls.

"There is something wrong with our cities because there is something wrong with ourselves."

Contrasts was hugely controversial

but it was also a bestseller,

putting the name of the 24-year-old Pugin on people's lips.

I think that it was hugely influential as an idea.

It doesn't go into great detailed arguments,

it hits a lot of popular targets bang on the nose.

And it made his reputation instantly as an architect,

even though he hadn't really built anything.

That anomaly soon disappeared.

Between 1838 and 1839,

Pugin was hard at work,

designing no fewer than 18 churches, two cathedrals, three convents,

and two monasteries

as well as several private homes and schools.

And this church, St Giles in Cheadle, Staffordshire,

epitomises this early rush of Pugin's work above all others.

It is Contrasts brought to life.

But while the exteriors of the church catch the eye...

it's the interior decorations that justify St Giles's nickname

of "Pugin's Gem."

Course, you don't really get a feel for it in this light.

Just need to go and put some money in the meter.

Cheadle is remarkable.

When the lights come on you see that you're surrounded

by images of saints and angels and prophets,

and that's what Pugin was trying to achieve.

He wanted it to be the case that wherever your eyes might rest

they see something to move you, to edify you, to enrich you.

Everything in here takes its inspiration

from Medieval churches,

not just in decoration

but also in the way that Pugin controls the space.

This is Pugin's rood screen,

which separated the nave and the people

from the chancel where the priests performed the mysteries of the mass.

It was hugely controversial -

nothing like this had been seen

in an English parish church for centuries,

but to Pugin, hugely important, as marking the point

at which Earth met Heaven

and the people had a window into paradise.

Pugin hoped that St Giles and his other Gothic Revival churches

would usher in a new, more spiritual age.

It would be devoutly Christian,

one where people respected and supported each other,

where the rich would provide both moral leadership

and financial care for the poor.

And Gothic architecture would shape and reflect

this brave new world.

Nobody had thought really before the late 18th century

that you would do anything with a Medieval building

other than either knock it down or simply adapt it to modern needs.

This idea that there was something of value in these buildings,

that they weren't just crude, asymmetrical lumpy things

was quite a new idea.

So what was it about these "crude, lumpy things"

that was so important to Pugin?

To answer that, we must look to his very earliest influences.

Pugin's parents couldn't have been more different.

Catherine Welby, his mother,

was from wealthy Lincolnshire land-owning stock.

The family's local parish church

gives you a good idea of the Welby heritage -

privileged,

traditional,

conservative.

But Pugin's father, Auguste Charles, was none of these.

A penniless artist, he'd fled to England

from the French Revolution.

He made a living drawing illustrations for architects

and could only afford the family home in Bloomsbury

thanks to Catherine's inheritance.

Auguste still had to work, travelling extensively,

often accompanied by his family.

And this peripatetic upbringing

would have a dramatic effect on Pugin's life.

Pugin had a very odd education.

He never went to school as we would understand it at all.

In some areas he was extraordinarily well-informed,

probably as well-informed as any adult of his generation.

In other areas - completely ignorant.

Every autumn his parents travelled around the country,

looking at - with his father drawing - Medieval buildings

and that was how Pugin learned about architecture.

When he was just six years old,

his parents took him to a building

that would inspire so much of his later work -

Lincoln Cathedral -

one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture in the whole country.

Pugin fell in love with Lincoln's Gothic features.

The dramatic flying buttresses that support the walls and roof.

The pointed arches that distribute the weight of masonry.

The gargoyles that double as gutters.

And he found the interiors just as impressive.

The genius of the Gothic builders is that they freed stone from gravity.

It leaps around you,

it soars through the air, dancing over your head.

It feels weightless.

You completely forget that you've got

thousands of tonnes of stone above you.

The building is an astonishing feat of engineering,

especially given that it was largely built around 700 years ago.

And in Pugin's eyes, it wasn't just beautiful,

it was honest.

He attributed this honesty

to the skill of the master craftsmen who'd built it.

They were like magicians,

but they'd showed you how they did their magic -

the pointed arches that could hold almost any weight,

the vaults that crisscrossed the ceilings

showing you exactly where the lines of power and force are.

And Pugin loved it.

These early visits clearly made their mark.

Pugin produced this drawing - entitled My First Design -

when he was just nine years old.

The Gothic influence is obvious

as is Pugin's skill as a draughtsman.

Pugin was to return to Lincoln time and again

to sketch details of its carvings and stonework.

These would go on to inspire the buildings and interiors

he would design as an adult.

But his influences weren't just from England.

Pugin's father ran a drawing school from their home in Bloomsbury.

It was where Pugin honed his prodigious artistic skills

and when he was 12, his father took both the family

and the drawing school pupils

on a sketching tour of northern France.

Here in Rouen,

they encountered some of the most spectacular Gothic architecture

in the whole of Europe.

Like Lincoln, Rouen entranced Pugin,

its majestic cathedral feeding his fascination

for all things Gothic.

Pugin's father took the boys to buildings right across the region

and they weren't just concerned with the aesthetics,

they were getting to grips with the detailed engineering

that held these Gothic wonders together.

At one church, Pugin's father had a hole smashed in the roof

and lowered some of them in one by one.

It was actually quite dangerous -

some of them struggled to get out again.

But the point was, to show the boys for themselves

not just how the church looked,

but how the church was constructed.

This was a theme of Pugin's entire life.

It wasn't just about theory, about what you read in books,

for buildings, you had to touch them, handle them, feel them.

Not all the places they visited were in good condition.

During the French Revolution, some 30 years before,

many churches had been attacked,

the stonework defaced, interiors looted.

For Pugin, this kind of vandalism

only reinforced the contrast

between the order of the Middle Ages

and the chaos he saw inherent in Revolutionary ideas.

But there was one way in which he benefited from this destruction.

Artefacts from smashed Medieval buildings

flooded markets of the day,

and were available at knock-down prices.

It was the beginning of Pugin's lifelong passion

for collecting them.

Pugin would have loved a place like this,

although in his day

it would have been full of Medieval art and antiquities.

He liked nothing more than rummaging through shops,

picking through rubbish heaps

and hustling the clergy to see what he could get his hands on.

He wasn't always completely straight about it either.

There's one story that he got wind of a collector of Medieval glass

who was never going to sell.

So he just went around when the man was out,

chatted up the wife, and before the man came home

had left with pockets full of Medieval stained glass.

The 12-year-old Pugin might have returned from France

with a sackful of Medieval antiquities

and yet more drawings of Gothic design,

but he remained as yet unmoved by the Catholicism

being practised in these great cathedrals.

Pugin's own religious upbringing owed more to his mother Catherine.

Staunchly Protestant,

she followed the English norm of Low Church services,

practised in chapels like this one.

Well, you could hardly get more different

from a Medieval cathedral, could you?

Chapels like this, known as preaching boxes,

were deliberately plain.

They were meant NOT to stimulate the eye

because the entire focus is intended to be there,

on the pulpit and on the preacher sounding out the word of God.

Catherine was a devoted follower of Edward Irving,

one of the leading evangelists of the time

and she was determined to imbue her teenage son with similar devotion.

But since Irving's sermons lasted for hours,

it was always going to be a big ask.

"Do thou who gave us thy son for sinful men now quicken my thoughts

"that they may come...?

"But were my God pleased to grant me thus,

"how little doth it avail

"amongst the myriads in the world...

"And how abler men have endeavoured in vain

"to beat these difficulties down."

And so it goes on and on for hour after hour.

Pugin must have felt like he was in purgatory

having to listen to this stuff.

He may have agreed with Irving that the world needed changing,

but it wasn't going to change like this.

Pugin grew to loathe Irving

and the Low Church style of service,

and as a teenager, he developed a quite different devotion -

to the theatre.

Theatre was hugely popular in the early 19th century

and Pugin was an ardent follower of London productions.

And the theatre offered him one of his first full-time jobs.

I've come to the Theatre Royal in Richmond,

one of the few Georgian theatres left,

to find out more about the world the 15-year-old Pugin was now to enter.

This is such fun!

You can see how a young boy like Pugin would have been entranced

by a place like this.

Pugin first worked in the "flies" -

flying scenery on and off the stage.

But with his skills as a draughtsman,

he quickly graduated to designing sets.

He was now working in three dimensions

and learning how to use detail to create dramatic impact.

What theatre would Pugin have experienced in the 1820s?

There was a desire,

which had been developing over a number of years,

to perceive the actors

as part of their environment.

To set Shakespeare for example, within his historical location.

For the first time,

the scenery was becoming a character in the play.

-Pugin designed for Henry VIII?

-Henry VIII at Covent Garden in 1831.

-You can see the tremendous interest in details.

-Mm.

This sort of Gothic sideboard, side table at the back there,

the Gothic sofas,

and the detail on the door.

All that reality, all that truth,

all that accuracy was very important.

The theatre gave Pugin his first opportunity

to play with design on a grand scale.

It also showed him how design could influence

people's feelings and thoughts.

Pugin was totally stage-struck.

On the stage, he saw architecture animated, satirised,

used as a kind of polemical tool.

That sense of the dramatic certainly carried over

into the buildings Pugin designed.

And the theatre left its mark on his personal life, as well.

Georgian theatres were notorious

for immorality on both sides of the curtain

with prostitutes plying their trade in vacant boxes.

It wasn't just George IV who succumbed to urges of the flesh.

To what extent Pugin indulged these temptations we'll never know,

but his first two wives did have theatrical connections.

And his first wife, Anne, was five months pregnant

when the 19-year-old Pugin walked up the aisle with her.

Pugin wasn't the first or last young man to get his girlfriend pregnant

but his strong moral sense of right and wrong

meant that he wasn't going to abandon her.

By all accounts, their marriage was very happy.

But it was destined to be brief.

Anne died shortly after giving birth to their daughter.

It was the first in a series of tragedies to strike the young Pugin.

Within little more than a year,

first his father and then his mother fell ill and died.

At the age of 21, Pugin found himself widowed and -

but for his infant daughter -

alone.

The heartbreaking loss of those closest to him

and his distaste for the society in which he was left to fend

combined to shape the rest of Pugin's life.

Having been the only child of older parents,

part of a very peculiarly close-knit family,

this shattering series of bereavements

led him to look back at the Gothic architecture -

that he'd known since he was a child - in a different way.

And certainly he came to see it as more than architecture

and it was as if, perhaps amid the wreckage in this very young life,

the one love that hadn't failed,

the one thing he could turn to.

Pugin embraced the great Gothic world

he'd fallen in love with as a child

as a solution both to his own and to society's problems.

It was this vision that he would lay out in Contrasts,

using the Medieval, pre-Reformation world

as a template to solve the problems of today.

And it wasn't just an architectural shift.

Embracing the Gothic Age meant rejecting the Reformation

and all it stood for.

It meant becoming a Catholic.

To become a Catholic in the early 19th century

was to take a big risk

because there was still widespread anti-Catholic sentiment.

A bit like becoming a Communist in the 1930s,

becoming a Catholic in the 1830s marked you as an outsider,

maybe even a revolutionary.

As Pugin was to discover, such people would be treated

with suspicion and prejudice.

PRIESTS PERFORM PLAINCHANT

He'd converted to Catholicism whilst writing Contrasts,

favouring an ancient ceremonial style of worship,

complete with plainchant.

It's easy to see the attraction this might have had for Pugin.

It has a dramatic, theatrical quality about it.

But it's not just about the style.

I think Pugin would have felt that this kind of service

had a substance to it,

one that captured the mystery and magic of faith.

What's certainly true,

is his conversion to Catholicism was heartfelt

and the zeal of the new convert

is part of what gave Contrasts its edge.

He was saying the Catholics are going to take back the great cathedrals.

"I am going to walk through the west door of Salisbury Cathedral again,

"as a Catholic."

I mean, it's a very militant book if you read the text.

The stridently Catholic tone of Contrasts was controversial

but it did win him some friends,

none more important

than the rich and influential Catholic, John Talbot,

the 16th Earl of Shrewsbury.

It was Shrewsbury's money

that financed most of Pugin's early commissions,

including St Giles in Cheadle.

And Pugin also relied on a close band of collaborators

to turn his designs into reality.

None were more important than the builder, George Myers.

George Myers was a Yorkshireman, red of face, bushy of beard,

his brow knitted in a frown of perpetual concentration.

He became Pugin's master builder.

He had the knack both of knowing what Pugin wanted

and the technical ability to realise it.

When Myers wasn't involved, disaster could strike.

On one church that used another builder,

the belfry fell down

but when Myers was involved, Pugin's dreams could take flight.

It was a similar story of collaboration

inside Pugin's churches.

Cheadle's paintings of the saints were done by John Crace,

who would go on to produce many of the curtains,

carpets and wallpapers that Pugin designed.

Herbert Minton, a tile-maker from Stoke,

revived the Medieval technique of encaustic tile-making,

creating these patterns with different inlaid clays.

And all this intricate metalwork

was supplied by Pugin's closest friend - John Hardman.

In time, Hardman's Birmingham works

would not just make intricate metalwork

but stained glass

and the sovereign's throne in the House of Lords,

all to Pugin's design.

Creating this wealth of detail was a huge undertaking,

but Pugin felt it worth the result.

In later life he said,

"Cheadle, perfect Cheadle,

"my consolation in all my afflictions."

When Cheadle was finally consecrated,

it was a national and international event,

attended by bishops and archbishops and ambassadors.

Cheadle was a vision of the future,

a template for what the English village church would be,

but for me, it's also like stepping inside Pugin's brain.

It fizzes and pops, constantly working, constantly active.

Who would have thought that the character of a man could be captured in a church?

Pugin didn't just build churches for Shrewsbury.

He remodelled his country seat on Gothic lines too.

And it was from here that the two men worked towards

a romantic re-unification of the English church,

hoping to create one that was devoutly Catholic, uniquely English and totally Gothic.

It was a vision which, like Shrewsbury's old estate,

was destined to fail.

This ruin can be taken as a metaphor for Pugin's dreams for a more moral, Catholic Britain.

But if it's a metaphor you're after,

Shrewsbury's great family seat is now Alton Towers.

With its high-speed rides, thrills and spills, up and downs,

it's the perfect metaphor for Pugin's life from now on.

They might have deplored his conversion to Catholicism,

but Anglicans were starting to take note of Pugin's work.

The library at Lambeth Palace, the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury,

holds one of the few surviving original copies of Pugin's second great book,

The True Principles of Pointed Architecture.

Published in 1841, it lays out six principles for building in the Gothic style

and I've come here to find out what impact it had.

Timothy Brittain-Catlin is an expert on architecture and the Gothic Revival in particular.

His first book is about how good architecture

is the result of good society.

This book is a book for architects and it tells you how to do it. It's an instruction book

and it explains very carefully the overall principles,

right down to the details of how architecture should be designed

and made so as to be consistent with his vision of a good building and a good society.

The two go together, that's very central to Pugin's message.

"The smallest detail must serve a purpose or have a meaning," he says.

You turn each little bit of it into something which expresses

not only the message of the building, but also its construction and constructional role.

As long as it's part of the construction,

you're allowed to decorate it?

You are, even if it's a very tiny part of the construction.

One of my favourite examples is of a set of hinges.

Pugin is comparing a modern door hinge, hidden between the door and the frame,

something you never see and never think about, with a beautiful wrought-iron hinge of a Gothic door.

It's expressing the material that it's made from,

it's got something of the human touch of the person that made it

and it's expressing the "openingness", the "door-iness" of the door, as it were.

All that from just one tiny piece of metal.

-I think all of my doors are on these hidden hinges...

-You ought to get rid of those!

They're completely immoral. You'll be in trouble there.

-This is a book of passionate feeling?

-Yes.

-It's a highly emotional, highly charged book.

-It's also very funny.

It's a very funny book. His books are hysterical.

-He's a very good writer.

-What are the funny parts?

Well, he always has a good insult. If something's not a "miserable expedient" it's "abomination".

One of his rudest jokes is to mix up the works of very good architects,

Soane, Nash and so on, with the work of third-rate architects in the same picture.

He's saying all these classical people they're all the same, it's all rubbish and silly.

Whereas Gothic architecture, it's not the person that matters,

it's the thing that matters, the physical nature of the construction

and that's why it caught on because it made sense.

Pugin talks a lot about truth, what he means is that

buildings should be honest, that's to say they should be the thing that they appear to be

and there is a sense here, all about that God is looking at your building

and God goes round the back and if you've used cheap bricks

round the back, he's going to know and he's going to be cross.

-It's a question of morality.

-Yes, it's a question of morality.

And in fact that's one of Pugin's most lasting contributions to architectural history.

That a style of architecture could be more moral than another one.

That's completely new, no-one else has come up with that before.

Whether it's a church or a house

or a railway station or a hospital or a school,

-all should be built in accordance with the true principles?

-Yes.

-And increasingly, most of them were?

-Increasingly, most of them were.

There is a new generation of architect.

They believe every word that they read here, almost as if it's gospel.

George Gilbert Scott, one of the most influential architects of Victorian England said,

when he read one of Pugin's books,

"I felt as if I had been awoken from my slumbers," and he changed his ways immediately.

Within five years of True Principles coming out

you can see Puginite architecture across the country.

Thanks to Pugin, Gilbert Scott and others,

the early Victorians built a wave of new Gothic-style churches,

railway stations, schools and town halls,

transforming the landscape of Britain,

and inspiring subsequent generations of architects, right into the 21st century.

The work of today's hi-tech architects, like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster,

has its foundations in Pugin's principles of making a building reflect its use,

and of putting the user at the centre of the design process.

Modern hi-tech architects often talk about the mid-Victorian period, as being the one that inspired them.

It's the one where the architect is in control of every last thing,

when they were doing it out of a strong desire to change something completely.

It's a very powerful chapter in architects' collective consciousness, I think.

In 1834, a fire burnt down the medieval Palace of Westminster.

"Good riddance" was the response of many

because it'd come to stand for a whole culture of political corruption.

It was decided the replacement should be in the new Gothic style,

which presented Pugin with the opportunity

to stamp his moral ideas on the very seat of British power.

Pugin's expertise was instrumental

in helping architect Charles Barry eventually win the commission.

The work of both men is clearly evident in the finished building -

the rhythm and symmetrical layout betrays Barry's classical training and instincts.

But the Gothic details, vanes that catch the light,

carved stonework, and the spires, are undoubtedly Pugin's touches.

And Pugin was to have an even greater influence on the interior design.

D. Mark Collins, the Palace's Archivist and Historian,

is here to show me some of Pugin's work in the House of Lords.

-Hello, I'm Richard.

-Very pleased to meet you. What an amazing room!

Yes, we're standing in the Peers' Lobby,

which is a place where members of the House of Lords can gather

before they go into the House of Lords chamber.

-How much of this is Pugin?

-All the designs in here.

The designs for the floor tiles, the stained glass as well,

heraldry features throughout the Palace, Pugin loved heraldry,

and it's in all the main rooms on the principal floor.

These gates are more like screens than gates.

They are a spectacular example of the work of John Hardman,

who made all the cast brass throughout the building

and also the stained glass as well.

This is almost like a choir screen that you might find in a church.

-It also gives you a semi-religious feeling about government.

-Yes, I think so.

Yes, you have a hierarchy of spaces throughout the Palace.

Could we go in?

Yes. They're very heavy, these gates.

-They weigh one and a half tonnes altogether.

-Crikey.

Wow...

You are, once again, surrounded by Pugin's ideas.

-In this case, his idea of power.

-Yes, it's meant to overawe the viewer.

Every single surface is covered with carving.

On top of that you have painted decoration and gilding.

He said he made over a thousand drawings

-for the wooden panelling in here alone.

-Really, a thousand?

With a whole Palace as his canvas, Pugin was in overdrive.

Barry described him as "working with 50 horsepower of creation"

and he urged Pugin to slow down, lest he make himself ill.

Yet the massive workload didn't compromise Pugin's vision at all,

especially when it came to the Sovereign's Throne.

It was tradition that wherever there was a formal throne or seat

for the monarch, then there would have been a canopy over him.

It has a great deal of imagery.

You have the orders of chivalry which are depicted by these little knights in armour.

And behind the throne, the Cloth of State, as it's known, which is the Royal Coat-of-Arms.

It's not a cloth, of course. It is carved wood. In this case, all oak.

It makes you think of Arthur, Guinevere, Knights of the Round Table

and a sort of Walter Scott view of the Middle Ages?

It is a deliberate revival of English history,

making the Parliament here a special case, separate from those on the Continent.

The extent of Pugin's contribution led some people to claim

that he, not Barry, should be viewed as the true architect of the Palace of Westminster.

Just look at this design for an imaginary college, drawn by Pugin in 1834,

the year the Houses of Parliament burnt down.

The resemblance is uncanny.

However, Pugin was destined to written out of the Palace's history for decades.

Charles Barry drew in all the drawings from Pugin

without actually making a public acknowledgement of the work

that Pugin had undertaken, so Pugin simply remained Barry's ghost.

He was really written out.

In the early guide books of the Palace, he wasn't mentioned on one single occasion.

-Not once?

-No, no.

It was in Barry's interest to sideline his collaborator,

but Pugin himself contributed to his own undoing.

He had no interest really in his reputation.

He had no ability to manage publicity or build his persona.

He liked to please people.

He did the whole of the Palace of Westminster

because he liked Charles Barry and didn't want to say "no".

So he did what he did, and was largely forgotten.

Pugin missed out financially as well.

While Barry received nearly £25,000 for his work,

Pugin was paid a paltry £800.

A commission that should have set Pugin up for life thus became just another job.

Worse still, despite the popularity of the Gothic style he helped create,

Pugin found his architectural work drying up.

Anglican rivals were being commissioned instead.

Then came another hammer blow.

Louisa, his second wife, and mother to five of his children,

died after a short illness.

Pugin was devastated. He became increasingly manic,

sparkling with new ideas one moment,

sunk in depression the next.

Now aged 32,

Pugin would struggle with mental illness for the rest of his life.

His eyesight began to fail and lurching between exuberance and paranoia,

his manic behaviour would become evident in his work.

He moved to Ramsgate,

and it's here that he produced the third of his great books,

An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England.

The book, a strident defence of Gothic,

is Pugin's least coherent, a product of his increasingly violent mood swings.

But it builds on the ideas outlined in True Principles,

applying Gothic design to all forms of building

and every aspect of interior design.

From shutters to seats, from furniture to fireplaces,

Pugin argued that the idea of Gothic could be applied to them all

and there's no better place to see those ideas put into action

than at the home he built for himself in Ramsgate, The Grange.

The Grange is completely different from Georgian houses,

which were designed to show a flat symmetrical front behind which rooms were just fitted in.

Here the house has been designed from the inside out,

its exterior appearance driven by the interior use of space.

It's recently been restored by the Landmark Trust.

I'm meeting their conservation officer, Caroline Stanford,

to learn how Pugin's life and work converge.

-Hello, I'm Richard.

-Caroline.

-Pleased to meet you.

-This is quite something.

-It's a very special space.

You get a real sense of what Pugin was trying to do with his own home

in this particular hallway.

It's quite radical. You'd never mistake this for a Georgian House.

No. If you look here,

you can see how the hallway is set at the centre of the house.

Then you've got all the rooms spinning off this central space

in a centripetal way almost.

Everything is swirling around.

Exactly. It's really a very dynamic space.

There's a sense of movement all the way round,

the stairs shooting up in one direction, these open galleries around,

and then his own personal wallpaper, this outrageous diagonal design,

with his personal motto, "En Avant", "upwards", ever onwards, you feel.

Is it a bit much? You're surrounded by his crest and his initials?

It is, isn't it? This was a dynamic, self-absorbed individual

who was just bursting with life in his ideas and his designs.

Everything in the house, from floor tiles to banisters,

is so overwhelming with its sense of Gothic

that it blurs the line between genius and madness.

So this is the dining room...

Yes, the wallpaper is the original colourway.

Fairly mad, but that's what he had.

The candlesticks are nice examples

of the metalwork that the Hardman Studios would have sent out across the whole country.

-And even the doorknob is Gothic.

-Gothic doorknobs!

Look at the little escutcheon and the nice segmented knob.

All of these infused by the spirit of the Middle Ages

and yet produced in the most modern techniques.

Fantastic.

Nowhere in the house better demonstrates Pugin's Gothic obsession than his library,

where everything from the pieces on the bookshelves,

to the inscriptions on the wall was meant to saturate him in the Medieval.

We can imagine him sitting here at his desk, working,

but he's also surrounded all the way round the room on this frieze

by the names and coats-of-arms of places and people that he loved.

So we've got the great cathedrals of Britain,

-we've got saints, we got patrons, we've got family names.

-This was meant to give him inspiration?

Yes. It's the most personal room we have, for Pugin the man, I think.

Married for a third time,

Pugin would base himself at The Grange for the rest of his life.

Cloistered in his Gothic world, he became fixated on his vision.

The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park was intended to showcase

the best in design and manufacturing.

Pugin leapt at the opportunity.

Typically innovative, he entered a huge multi-faceted exhibit,

inevitably on Gothic lines.

When the exhibition opened in 1851,

Pugin's Medieval Court, with its statues, wall hangings,

and metalwork produced by Myers, Crace and Hardman,

was a big hit with the public and critics alike.

The Illustrated London News was particularly fulsome.

"To Mr Pugin is due the highest honour," it said,

"for demonstrating the applicability of the Medieval Arts

"in all their richness and complexity to the uses of the present age."

But when the prizes for the exhibits were awarded, Pugin lost out.

The categories were organised around manufacturers,

and Pugin, as a designer, just didn't fit into any of them.

So once again, the fact that he was ahead of his time

actually counted against him.

Plunged into depression, Pugin began to suffer momentary black-outs.

His finances remained shaky, due largely to the cost of the church

he was building next door to The Grange, St Augustine's.

Although this church is very obviously Gothic,

it marks yet another departure for Pugin.

Rather than the rising vertical lines,

there are horizontal lines holding it permanently in place.

And between them, this beautiful knapped flint,

that seems to rise up from the cliffs underneath it.

The church also marks a departure from Pugin's earlier work

when it comes to the interiors.

Unlike St Giles' Cheadle, or the eye-popping details of The Grange,

St Augustine's is calm, serene, simple.

It's a fact that's making the job of restoring the church easier.

Paul Sharrock is the architect in charge.

This is gorgeous, isn't it?

It is, isn't it? This is Pugin's vision.

This is Pugin designing for himself.

And this is his Catholic vision of design.

What restoration work are you undertaking?

The building is well built, but it's 170 years old now

and we have problems with the roofs and we have some problems with the tower.

Electrics, which are not his problem, but are ours,

so there a number of things of that nature.

But, what is surprising is actually everywhere you look,

how the craftsmanship has stood up.

-Do you think he had something that we've lost today?

-Yes, I do.

And, in a way, this building captures it.

This building, for him, was an act of faith,

it was saying, "This is how I believe the Catholic Church should be."

And it's that kind of personal feeling that you have of a man

who spent over £14,000 of his own money building this building.

An astonishing amount of money.

-Cos you could build a church then for..?

-£1,500.

-Right, so it's ten times.

I mean, an enormous sum of money.

The cost of St Augustine's was a constant drain on Pugin's finances

and he was never able to afford its spire.

To meet its expense, he took on more and more work,

but only at a cost to his fragile health.

Then, a few weeks before Pugin's 40th birthday,

Barry came to The Grange to discuss the Palace of Westminster's most prominent feature,

the clock tower for Big Ben.

The design of this landmark feature had been under discussion for years.

Several designs had been submitted and rejected and, in desperation,

Barry turned once again to Pugin, to come up with a fitting solution.

Suffering from piles, worms, bouts of narcolepsy and apocalyptic visions,

Pugin, with one final flash of inspiration, produced his most famous work.

The tower of Big Ben is one of those buildings

that you've seen so many times, you've stopped seeing it for looking.

But it's absolutely lovely.

It rises up from the ground in this stately rhythm, higher and higher,

before you reach the clock face,

picked out as a giant rose - its petals fringed with gold.

There're some Medieval windows above that.

and then you hit the grey slate roof, it greyness relieved

by these delicate little windows - again picked out in gold leaf.

And then it rises up again in this great jet of gold,

to the higher roof that curves gracefully upwards to a spire

with a crown and flowers and a cross.

It's elegant, it's grand, it's pretty,

it has this fairy tale quality and it makes you proud to be British.

Too ill to work any more, Pugin wouldn't live to see his design built.

BIG BEN STRIKES THE HOUR

In February 1852, he suffered a mental breakdown on a trip to London,

unable to recognise even his closest friends.

Some said this was down to overwork,

some to the medication he was taking, but whatever the reason,

he was consigned to Bedlam for several months

before his wife Jane was able to take him home.

He never really recovered, and on 14th September 1852, he died,

aged just 40.

Pugin's tomb, here in his own church of St Augustine,

is decorated with carvings of his family.

His three wives, Anne, Louisa and Jane,

are illuminated in the stained glass above him.

When someone dies, it can be an opportunity to reassess their life

and acknowledge everything that they've achieved.

But even that was denied Pugin.

His death coincided with that of another Kent resident -

The Duke of Wellington.

Wellington's death plunged the whole nation into mourning

and Pugin to the back pages of history.

In life, Pugin never received due credit,

and, in death, he was sidelined for over a century.

But recently, there has been a re-appraisal.

Pugin was, perhaps, the one architect

whose sense of the spiritual shaped the face of the Britain we know.

His work underpins so much of what we see,

be it pumping stations to the Palace of Westminster,

town halls to village churches.

Our high streets, everything would be different.

We have to think of him as an utterly inspirational figure.

The amount that he achieved in his lifetime

really has to be an inspiration to us all.

He's very comparable with Brunel.

If one thinks of these two half-French little boys

who, between them, remade the 19th-century landscape.

Every time Brunel built a railway line, Pugin went and built a church.

Pugin's legacy is around us.

You can see it in the work of our hi-tech architects,

Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Nicolas Grimshaw, for example.

If you work in the office of one of these architects today,

you'll realise that even the smallest detail of their building

is designed as part of a coherent architectural language

which speaks of the whole nature of the building and this is Pugin's message.

There's no doubt that if Pugin had never lived,

Britain simply wouldn't look the way it does today.

But it's about more than just the look.

It's about a vision.

A vision of architecture as a moral force, a force for good.

And it's a vision that's as relevant today as it was then,

and THAT is why we should remember the name

of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

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