Having concluded my discussion of Pugin’s Contrasts in Part 2, we turn to a group of Pugin sketches labeled “topographical drawings.” They are “topographical” in the dictionary meaning of “the study or description of the configuration of any object.” They are neither products of Pugin’s imagination nor his plans for buildings to be erected. Rather, they are drawings of structures existing at the time Pugin drew them. These are typically contained in sketchbooks in which Pugin drew on his many travels in England and the Continent. About 80 of these are of interest to us here because they are of ensembles of buildings.

Prior to 2012, very few of Pugin’s drawings were available for public viewing — either in a book, online, or on display at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. And those that were available were frequently faint. In 2012, however, high quality, well-contrasted photographs taken in 1865 of 500 of Pugin’s drawings were posted online by the Cadbury Research Library, available online. In recent years, each has been given a unique number and a description. About 80 of these are topographical drawings consisting of ensembles of buildings. Some are of entire towns, often walled towns.

What do these 80 or so drawings demonstrate for our purposes? We know Pugin was knowledgeable about the details of Gothic buildings, inside and out, from top to bottom. He knew gargoyles and windows and wallpaper and eaves. He knew the foundations of medieval buildings from his up-close inspection after making excavations. He knew ceilings by drawing them while lying in a hammock suspended near the ceilings like Michelangelo. He taught stonemasons how to do what they had never done before, namely, recreate medieval stonework. But these 80 drawings demonstrate that he studied how buildings could relate to one another.

Pugin’s Built Works

Now we turn to Pugin’s architectural works. Unlike his topographical drawings, these are works for which Pugin expected compensation and which he expected to be built. From these we seek to identify examples of buildings and ensembles of buildings that might match his social vision in Contrasts. To qualify for my interest, such buildings must include residences. All told, Pugin designed about 60 residential buildings — private homes, rectories, monasteries, colleges, and convents.

I put aside for my purposes the kind of ensembles which are commonplace for American Catholics, namely, parish ensembles consisting of a church, a rectory (residence for priest or bishop), convent, and a parochial school. Pugin designed such parish ensembles associated with St. George’s Cathedral, Southwark; St. Giles, Cheadle; St. Oswald’s, Liverpool; and elsewhere.

I would include, however, a Pugin parish ensemble which had something more, such as the Mercy Convent at Handsworth described below.

I also exclude as commonplace — common before, during, and after Pugin’s life — the use of quadrangles for colleges. This includes Pugin’s work in designing Magdalene College and Balliol College of the University of Oxford (unexecuted), St. Patrick’s College in Maynooth, Ireland (all but the chapel executed), St. Marie’s College, Oscott, Birmingham (a seminary; he was hired to complete another architect’s design). Similarly, his design of Mount St. Bernard’s, a Trappist monastery, had the same quadrangle.

This leaves just five[i] architectural works to match his vision in Contrasts:

• John the Baptist “Hospital,” Alton Castle, and Lodging for Stonemasons, Alton;
• Pugin’s Home (“The Grange”), St. Edward’s Presbytery, and St. Augustine’s Abbey Church, Ramsgate;
• Joseph Almshouses, St. Joseph Primary School, St. Mary’s Church, Chelsea;
• Mercy Convent and Church of St. Mary, Handsworth, Birmingham; and
• Anne’s Bedehouse, Lincoln.

John the Baptist “Hospital,” Alton Castle, and Lodging for Stonemasons, Alton (started 1841)

I believe that the best example of an ensemble of buildings that would match Pugin’s vision in Contrasts was his collaboration with John Talbot, the 16^th Earl of Shrewsbury (1791-1852), who shared Pugin’s vision and had the wealth to fund the building of St. John’s Hospital in Alton. Despite its name, it was not a hospital as that word was used in the 19^th century or now; rather, it was a medieval “hospital.” It was not necessarily for the sick. Pugin used the word “hospital” in the same way that he used “hospitality.”

While St. John Hospital was under construction, Pugin published a “bird’s-eye” drawing (an aerial view without the aid of a crane, balloon, plane, helicopter, or drone) of it in his 1842 book, Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England.[ii] Pugin accompanied the drawing in his book with four pages of small print text, including the following:

[I]t is intended for the following foundation: a warden and confrater, both in priests’ orders; six chaplains or decayed [i.e., elderly] priests, a sacrist[an], twelve poor brethren, a schoolmaster, and an unlimited number of poor scholars [elementary school students]. To accommodate these various persons the building will consist of a chapel, school, lodging for the warden, common hall, kitchen, chambers and library for the six chaplains, lodgings for the poor brethren, and a residence for the schoolmaster, all connected by a cloister.

* * *

[It is] a perfect revival of a Catholic hospital of the old time [of which, Pugin says, so many were destroyed by Henry VIII]… and in lieu of these most Christian and pious foundations for our poorer brethren, prisons are not substituted for those convicted of poverty.

A year later, in his An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843), Pugin wrote:

Hospitals for the poor ought, undoubtedly, to be erected in a style at once simple and religious: the aged should be provided with cloisters for sheltered exercise, — a common hall and kitchen, — separate lodging chambers, and a chapel for daily devotion, religious emblems and memorials of their benefactors should constitute the only decorations, interspersed with pious scriptures and moral legends. Beautiful examples of these truly Christian institutions are to be found in the ancient hospitals of Stamford, Leicester, Northampton, and Coventry, or even in the later foundations of Whitgift at Croydon, and Abbott at Guilford.[iii]

Pugin does not state that the school was originally intended to operate out of the nave of the chapel — with doors separating the sanctuary from the nave/schoolroom. The evidence for this fact of dual use has been identified and discussed in a book published in 2012 by the late Anglican Father Michael Fisher.[iv]

St. John Hospital was not a stand-alone building. It was part of an ensemble in Alton. The Hospital was situated across a short bridge over a deep ravine from Alton Castle, built in the 11^th century. Pugin and Lord Shrewsbury rebuilt this Castle. The Hospital and Castle formed a “coherent group.” Father Fisher writes:

Castle and almshouse stand together; the architecture is the same noble Gothic… In Pugin’s vision of England, prince and pauper live check-by-jowl in proper dignity and united by a common faith. The church contains no ‘squire’s pew’, and when the time came, the premier earl of England would be laid to rest, not in a grand mausoleum or a lordly family vault, but in a simple grave surrounded by those of his tenantry and bedesmen.[v]

There was a third aspect to this ensemble: lodging for stonemasons just below the precipice of Alton Castle and the Hospital. Workmen were needed to build the hospital, to rebuild the castle, and to construct additional buildings in the area. Pugin operated a quarry at which 21 men worked to fulfill the demands of 20 stonemasons. Pugin improved, and made additions to, a building for their lodging. Father Fisher observes:

The establishment of a masons’ community at Counslow seems to have been another of Pugin’s revivals, looking back as it did to medieval times when building lodges attached to cathedrals and greater churches served both as workshops and schools where architects and craftsmen would learn together and where skills would be passed on.[vi]

In Part 4, we will turn to the remaining built works of Pugin which evidence the social vision in his Contrasts. [A link to Part 2 is here.]

[i] Liverpool Roman Catholic Female Orphanage (also known as the Falkner Street Orphanage; 1845) might have been another example but I have been unable to obtain much information about either its interior or exterior.

[ii] Between pages 88 and 89. The book online is here. Current images of St. John Hospital can be located at British Listed Buildings and here and elsewhere.

[iii] Page 33, available online.

[iv] “Gothic For Ever”: A.W.N. Pugin, Lord Shrewsbury, and the Rebuilding of Catholic England, p. 129.

[v] Page 127. A “bedesmen” is a term for a pensioner, almsman, or licensed beggar. The word comes from the Middle English word bede meaning “prayer.” Their primary duty was to pray for the souls of their benefactors or the royal family in exchange for food, shelter, or financial support.

[vi] Pages 130-131.