Albury, Drummond and Pugin: Eccentric men, Gothic Revival and the Second Coming of Christ

The 1st of March is the birthday of a Victorian architect and designer, who shaped the Gothic Revival movement like no other: Augustus Pugin. 

He is perhaps best known for his work on the interior decorations of the Houses of Parliament, but he also designed many churches in England, Ireland, and even as far afield as Australia.

One church in the care of CCT, that bears his trademark take on the medieval is St. Peter and St. Paul’s, Albury in Surrey. Pugin came to the Albury commission thanks to his reputation as one of the chief experts on Gothic Revival interiors. And as someone who often quarrelled with his superiors, he struck up a perhaps unlikely creative relationship with his patron: Henry Drummond.

Both Drummond and Pugin were influenced by and in turn influenced ideas of reviving medieval architecture, but also pre-Reformation moral values and religious practices. Apart from this shared interest in the medieval, they outwardly had very little in common. Drummond came from an ancient Scottish noble family of exceptional pedigree, Pugin was born to middle class parents in Bloomsbury. One of Pugin’s core beliefs was that his time was lacking the Catholic virtue of “charity”, while Drummond was an initially fair, but increasingly eccentric and autocratic landlord, who struggled to maintain a good relationship with his tenants. 

Whatever their social, political and religious differences, in the Albury project Pugin and Drummond were united in their belief that a return to medieval aesthetics and values would prove to be an anti-dote to everything they disliked about their own time.

Drummond was a banker and politician, who bought Albury manor in 1819. At some point in the 1820s he became associated with the eccentric Scottish preacher Edward Irving. By 1830, Irving had been excommunicated and dismissed from his post in London for claiming to have received visions from God. His idea that a second coming of Christ would occur before the next Millenium, however, had a hold on Drummond who hosted several conferences at Albury to discuss religious ideas, which eventually resulted in the founding of a new denomination: The Catholic Apostolic Church. 

Following his conversion, Drummond set about altering the religious landscape around his estate, thereby further alienating his tenants. The old Saxon church of St. Peter and St. Paul’s was no longer suitable for his new ideas of worship. At the same time, it ceased to be Albury’s official parish church as Drummond wanted to create more private parkland around his manor house, thus creating a physical, as well as a spiritual separation between himself and the village. Most of the village had already been relocated by Drummond and his predecessors and in 1839 he commissioned Gothic Revival architect McIntosh Brookes to build the parishioners a new church closer to the new centre of the village, which was not a popular building. Around the same time, he commissioned McIntosh Brookes to build a church for Catholic Apostolic worship only, for which Pugin was to design the rose window. And lastly, he commissioned Pugin to re-model the interior of the old Saxon church, which Drummond was repurposing as a mortuary chapel for his family.

Pugin accepted the commission and even though he did not agree with Drummond’s religious beliefs, he seems to have found his work in Albury engaging.

The interior of the Drummond Chapel is now regarded as one of Pugin’s most successful projects and the name Pugin is as linked to the term Gothic Revival, as William Morris is to the Arts and Crafts Movement. But how did an architect with comparatively little successful architectural output define an entire artistic movement? And which Pugin are we talking about? 

There are several notable Pugins when it comes to Gothic Revival architecture. Augustus Pugin, who remodelled Albury, is the most important and the most well known Pugin today. However, he was largely forgotten and dismissed in the decades following his death, partly due to a change in fashion and partly due to scathing and influential criticism from John Ruskin, as well as anti-Catholicism. He was influenced by his father Auguste Pugin, a French emigree artist, whose most successful venture were collections of drawings of Gothic architectural features with precise measurements, which architects could use as templates for their new Gothic Revival buildings that were increasingly in demand as the younger Pugin was growing up. Augustus Pugin’s sons also became architects and continued their father’s legacy in the firm of Pugin & Pugin. His son Edward Welby Pugin (often referred to as E.W. Pugin) designed St. Katharine’s Church, Kingsdown, in Kent, which is now in the care of CCT.

To fit an account of the full life and complicated legacy of Augustus Pugin into one blogpost is a near impossible task, so this will be a brief and incomplete overview. For a more in-depth look at Pugin’s life and legacy, we recommend Rosemary Hill’s book “God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain” or her lecture on CCT Digital.

Young Augustus Pugin was educated in his father’s drawing school. Together with Auguste’s students, he helped create the drawings for Auguste’s publications travelling extensively in England and France to copy a wide variety of Gothic buildings.

Pugin’s youth, however, was unruly. Aiming to forge a path for himself independent of his comfortable Bloomsbury home, he sought and found employment as a set designer in the theatre in the much less reputable area of Covent Garden. This wasn’t sufficient excitement for the young Augustus Pugin though. Following some successful commissions, which he gained thanks to his father’s connections at a very young age, he set up his own furniture business, which he ran with much enthusiasm and little business sense. And still, he wasn’t satisfied. Alongside, designing sets and what could be described as an early iteration of flatpack furniture, which was often delivered late, he became a competent and semi-professional sailor, which allowed him to collect and trade antiques from the continent. 

Pugin perhaps always lived a little too much, too quickly. As his biographer Rosemary Hill puts it: “By the time Pugin was 21, he had been ship-wrecked, bankrupted and widowed.” He would die at the age of only 40, following a brief period of “madness”, possibly caused by hyperthyroidism or the long-term effects of syphilis – although theories as to Pugin’s cause of death vary greatly and are to be taken with caution.

In 1831, at the age of only 19 he had married Anne Garnett, whom he had met through one of his theatre friends. It was a brief and socially improper courtship that shocked his parents. Anne died a few months after the wedding in childbirth, leaving Pugin with a daughter, called Anne after her mother. The younger Anne would end up maturing quickly taking care of her father’s household and the many siblings that followed. 

Pugin would marry two more times. He married secondly Louisa Button, with whom he had five further children. Little is known about Louisa, but she passed away in 1844 after a short fever and was greatly mourned by her husband. 

Pugin’s third and last wife was Jane Knill. They married in 1848, only 4 years before Pugin’s death, which turned out to be a blessing for Pugin’s children, who would later affectionately refer to Jane as “The Great Woman”. Jane was a converted Roman Catholic from a family whose pedigree stretched back to the time of King John. She had been educated in France and was in every way Pugin’s ideal of a woman. She was 23 when they married and faced the enormous task of rearing Pugin’s six children from previous marriages, as well as the two babies she soon gave birth to, with admirable competence and likely some support from Anne, while Pugin himself was often away. After Pugin’s death she continued to care for his family despite financial strain and the children, in turn as they grew up, cared for her. Her son Peter Paul Pugin joined his half-brothers Edward and Cuthbert in the family firm of Pugin & Pugin. There are many great photographs of Jane on the Pugin Society website. 

The quality of Pugin’s buildings has been hotly debated over time. He had no formal training as an architect and lacked technical expertise. His strength lay in the details - interior decorations, furniture, and Gothic ornaments - and his best surviving work was executed in collaboration with other architects, for example the Houses of Parliament, on which he assisted Charles Barry. But as a historical character Pugin outshines many of his contemporaries and he has remained a figure of interest, in large part thanks to his unwavering commitment to all things “Gothic”. 

For Pugin “Gothic” was all encompassing. It touched every aspect of his life. He wanted Gothic clothes, a Gothic house, and even a Gothic wife. The medieval held such an attraction for him compared to his own industrial time, that he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1934. This was a risky move at the time, as legal and social discrimination against Catholics was still very much rife, resulting in limited opportunities for work going forward. “Gothic” in Pugin’s vision was not purely an architectural philosophy. He regarded the Middle Ages as a halcyon period and believed that adopting pre-reformation religious and moral values could solve the social issues of his own time. His fascination with pre-Reformation architecture was also religiously motivated, which gave him more zeal than many other Gothic Revival architects exhibited. His colourful and vibrant designs were a poignant rejection of neo-classical Georgian architecture, which he regarded as pagan and immoral. Stylistically he was mainly inspired by the architecture of 14th and 15th Century Europe. However, he was perhaps a better architectural theorist, than he was an architect.

In 1836 he published “Contrasts” a polemical work which compared contemporary or near contemporary buildings with their 15th- Century equivalents. However, in the book Pugin goes beyond aesthetics by arguing that buildings express and reinforce social values. Some of the lines of thought laid out in “Contrasts” still reverberate in theories of “placemaking” today.

Even though Pugin’s legacy wasn’t widely appreciated until the late 20th Century, following his death his influence bloomed in ways that far exceeded what he achieved in his lifetime. Architects like George Gilbert Scott, Butterfield and G.E. Street were inspired by him and his work also had an impact on Arts and Crafts artists like William Morris.

Below, you can see a list of churches that might not exist in their current form, were it not for Pugin: 

St. Catharines, Kingsdown, Kent

All Saints, Cambridge

St. John the Baptist, Inglesham, Wiltshire

All Saints, Ellough, Suffolk

St. Andrew's, East Heslerton, North Yorkshire

All Souls Church, Halifax, West Yorkshire

Interested in learning more about religion and art in the Victorian era? The following lectures on CCT Digital could be of interest to you:

Bells, Smells, and Persecution: Glimpses into the Anglican Catholic Revival

Espying Heaven: The High Anglican Aesthetic of Charles Eamer Kempe

The Unlikely Story Of How Oxford Invented The Modern Church