This essay is the latest of several I have written on what I call “faith-based land use planning,”[i] planning that integrates love of God and love of neighbor by including places of worship and places of service. My focus here is on the Victorian Gothic Revivalist Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-1852) about whom I have spoken and written for 30 years. It’s about Pugin’s vision for Christian land use and, to my knowledge, is the only sustained look at this vision.

A self-taught architect, Pugin is probably best known for his work on the British Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, for which he made over 2,000 drawings. He also designed, inside and out, nine cathedrals and 60 churches in the UK, Ireland, and Australia. He was a convert to Catholicism — a full ten years before the historic conversion of St. John Henry Newman.

Pugin’s influence was immediate and worldwide. For example, Pugin, without ever visiting the United States, had an immediate influence on church architecture, Episcopal and Catholic, in this country (see the late Johns Hopkins University professor Phoebe Stanton’s The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture, 1840-1856, published in 1997). In July of 2012, in conjunction with the bicentennial of Pugin’s birth, there was a four-day international conference on the Gothic Revival hosted by the University of Kent, Canterbury, England. The 50 conference papers addressed the Gothic Revival in Belgium, France, the American Midwest, Malta, New Zealand, Australia, Ontario, the Maritime Provinces of Canada, and more. This resulted in a book: Timothy Brittain-Catlin, et al., ed., Gothic Revival Worldwide: A.W.N. Pugin’s Global Influence (2016).

Although Pugin was a medievalist through and through, his motto was “En Avant!,” French for “Forward!” I focus on Pugin and the future of land use development.

In word and deed, Pugin advanced three causes:

• He advocated authentic, or “true,” Gothic over against inauthentic Gothic. One of his books is entitled “True Principles” (my emphasis).
• He championed Gothic over against classical style. He deemed the latter pagan. For example, the full title of the just-named book was True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (my emphasis). (This point of view did not endear him to John Henry Newman.) Unlike classical forms, the Gothic form sprang from a Christian culture and way of life. In Pugin’s view, although he did not specifically say it in this manner, Gothic architecture, Gregorian chant, and Thomistic philosophy are each quintessentially Christian.
• Pugin espoused a certain form, a Christian form, of what we today call land use development.

This last is a neglected aspect of his work that has universal relevance and is the subject of this essay and short blog series. I hope by its end that you will agree we should no longer ignore what Pugin wrote and did on this subject. Admittedly and unfortunately, Pugin did not write and do much in its regard. Why? Three answers:

• Pugin’s working life consisted of a mere 17 years. He was dead at age 40.
• His working life was consumed with the work summarized above. He was busy doing all the detail work for the Houses of Parliament, nine cathedrals, and 60 churches. The titles of some of the chapters of the catalogue that accompanied the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 1994 exhibition on Pugin, P. Atterbury and C. Wainwright, ed., Pugin: A Gothic Passion, illustrate this point: he designed wallpaper, furniture, ceramics, metalwork, stained glass, and textiles (vestments).
• Pugin traveled a great deal, mostly by stagecoach and later by a new technology: railroad. He traveled through France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, and throughout England. Some of this was for study. Some was to meet with clients or superintend the execution of his drawings. It took a lot of his time.

This said, however, Pugin did write and draw and plan in the field of land use development. Let’s look first at his book Contrasts, then to his “Imaginary Town,” next at his “topographical drawings,” and finally to some of the buildings he designed and built.

Pugin’s Contrasts

Pugin wrote but he was not a writer. His grammar and punctuation left a lot to be desired. When he wished to revise a manuscript, instead of revising the original text he would add appendices and footnotes. Pugin wrote several pamphlets. In fact, of his four principal written works, two are really just pamphlets since they consist of merely 50 printed pages each.

Land use was one of the subjects of Contrasts, Pugin’s first book, which he self-published at age 24, the full title of which was Contrasts: Or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day. Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (1^st ed. 1836; 2d rev. ed. 1841), available online. This book is unique because, although one focus is on architecture, it is also a work of social criticism, published two years before the social criticism offered by Charles Dickens (who was also born in 1812) in Oliver Twist and 12 years before Karl Marx (b. 1818) published the German-language edition of the Communist Manifesto.

Rosemary Hill, Pugin’s 2007 biographer, writes that the inspiration for Contrasts was a trip Pugin took to Wells, England, with his parents and his father’s drawing school pupils in 1832, when Pugin was 20. Pugin’s mother was a well-read daughter of an attorney, who, before she married, had lived in what we today call an “intentional community.” At Wells, this entourage saw an entire, living, medieval town, with a fully-formed planned street from the 14^th century. Not a stand-alone church. Not ruins. Pugin and his mother conversed about what they were seeing and contrasted it to contemporary towns, including their hometown, London.[ii] (You can see what they saw by looking at the many pictures of Wells, including aerial shots, online.)

From Wells, Pugin wrote a friend and included in his letter illustrations that contrasted “memorials” (that is, monuments to the deceased) of the years 1832 and 1532.[iii] Pugin used this artistic device of contrasting past and present in his book Contrasts which he published four years after his visit to Wells. Five of the contrasting pairs are of interest to us here.

In one pair of drawings, Pugin contrasted “Public Conduits,” that is, public water faucets, that, in the medieval case, were free-flowing but in the contemporary scene were barred to poor children. In two more pairs of drawings, Pugin contrasted the entrances to colleges and to churches, with the medieval open and the contemporary closed.

The fourth and fifth pairs of interest to us appeared for the first time in the second edition of Contrasts issued in 1841. In the fourth pair, Pugin contrasted residences for the poor. He surrounded his drawings with what we today would call cartoons — illustrations of vignettes in the lives of the poor in their contrasted residences. (He wrote some text to accompany his illustrated vignettes.) Pugin knew what it was like to be poor and to be thrown into prison for it. At age 19, he had failed at his business of designing and making furniture and was imprisoned for failure to pay his debts.[iv]

The fifth pair is a stunning one. It contrasts two entire towns. The pair consists of one drawing at the bottom of the page labeled “Catholic Town in 1440.” The top one was labeled “The Same Town in 1840.” Other than these labels and the names of individual buildings, Pugin wrote nothing about the drawings. But Margaret Belcher, late professor of English at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and editor of the multivolume collection of Pugin’s letters, has drawn out at length for us the meaning and implications of this pair of drawings. In this effort, she serves like an art critic who describes a painting where the painter expresses himself solely in the work of art. Professor Belcher writes, in part:

In the medieval town, fourteen of the named buildings are churches; trees grow along the banks of the river and the bridge allows free passage… [By contrast to] the consistent practice of the Gothic style in the old town… the structures of the new town are uniform only in their harsh, monotonous ugliness… [A] vast jail… occupies what used to be open land available for the enjoyment of all. The peaceful old churchyard has been enclosed and converted into ‘Pleasure Grounds’ for the family at the new parsonage. The river-banks have been turned into wharfs, the trees felled… the bridge is closed by a toll-gate… [T]he marks of a free and generous community have disappeared; the evidence here is for social exclusiveness, a competing proliferation of [religious] sects, mechanized, dirty and noisy industry, the pursuit of money, the advent of madness and crime… [W]arehouses dwarf and obscure the churches which dominated the medieval scene…[v]

In Part 2, I will continue my discussion of Pugin’s Contrasts.

[i] “Active Adult Communities and the ‘Grace of Chaos,’” American Spectator, Aug. 24, 2010; “Infrastructure for Believers,” Living City (Focolare), Oct. 2006, republished by OrthodoxyToday, Feb. 4, 2007; and “Faith-Based Land Use Planning,” Sacred Architecture Journal, vol. 5, no. 1 (Spring, 2001), p. 19.

[ii] God’s Architect: Pugin & the Building of Romantic Britain, pp. 103-04. I am drafting a richly illustrated pamphlet on the subject of the impact of Wells on Pugin.

[iii] I published the full letter in my brief essay, The Impact of Medieval Wells on Pugin, Pugin Society e-newsletter #32, Summer 2025, unpaginated.

[iv] For a narrative of conditions of the poor in 19^th century England, see Ruth Richardson’s 2012 book, Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor.

[v] Belcher, “Pugin Writing,” in P. Atterbury and C. Wainwright, ed., Pugin: A Gothic Passion, p. 107 (1994).