171 years ago today, the world was deprived of the extraordinary architect Augustus Pugin — responsible for most of the Palace of Westminster, and swept away at only 40. By his punishing workload? Er, no. Most likely a dose of the clap.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was the son of architectural draughtsman Augustus Charles Pugin, and designed his first church when he was nine. It wasn’t built, obviously, but it showed the direction he was going in.
As did his choice of religion. His mother took him to see a Scottish Presbyterian preacher when he was a child, and (according to early biographer and fellow architect Benjamin Ferrey) he rebelled to become fervently Catholic.
He published his first book on architecture, Contrasts, when he was just 24, and made it clear in there that dour austerity was not for him by placing images of old and new side by side.
His point was that the neoclassical architecture of the 18th century was beastly by comparison to medieval architecture, which seems odd, because both those pubs look delightful to me. Mind you, I was born in the 20th century, which gave the world
…and I live in the 21st, which considers this acceptable
But I digress. His point was that medieval architecture was better and more Christian. Mind you, he also wanted “a return to the … social structures of the Middle Ages”, which is not an idea that stands up to very much scrutiny.
Still, neoclassicism was old by then, and associated with George IV’s vast spending on Buckingham Palace, and he caught the eye of another gothic revivalist, Charles Barry. Pugin supplied drawings for Barry’s bid to rebuild the recently burnt-down Palace of Westminster.
And supplied drawings for the rival bid of James Gillespie Graham. Not many flies on Augustus. According to his most recent biographer, Rosemary Hill (God’s Architect, 2007):
Barry paid him 400 guineas and Graham 300
By the time he was 30, he’d built
22 churches, three cathedrals, three convents, half a dozen houses, several schools and a Cistercian monastery.
One of the churches was this one: St Giles, Cheadle.
So, it was popularly supposed that he drove himself to psychosis through overwork, apparently working day and night to produce more than 10,000 drawings for Barry, but Rosemary Hill has other ideas…
In the last year or so of his life he probably suffered from a thyroid condition. Hyperthyroidism would account for the perspirations, the exaggerated appetite and restlessness and the dramatic weight loss as well as the ‘dropping asleep’. But it would not explain the many earlier episodes of illness that had afflicted him periodically from 1835, when he first recorded trouble with his eyesight. These episodes were, it seems reasonable to suppose, due to the same disease. In the nineteenth century the only condition that could cause such recurring incidence of illness involving the nervous and ocular systems and ending in death was syphilis. The circumstantial evidence supports this conclusion.
It’s possible that a Catholic convert could be a hypocrite who put it about a bit, of course, but Hill has an alternative explanation. Before he converted, and before he got his first architectural work, young Augustus fell in with A Bad Crowd: theatrical types.
He got work at the Royal Opera House, designing sets, at a time, Hill says, when he was “so confident, so headstrong, so naïve and at seventeen beginning to be curious about women” (a combination anyone who hasn’t had an STD can recognise as risky).
As well as the low-class company he might fall into in the fly loft, the theatres were notorious for immorality on both sides of the curtain. The lobbies at Covent Garden were openly used for soliciting, and the prostitutes, when the house was not full, used the boxes for business. Actresses and dancers were thought of as little better than prostitutes themselves, and while this was a slander in many cases, backstage mores were certainly very different from those of Great Russell Street. Venereal disease was endemic.
Given that the treatment at the time was mercury, I think we can see why an early infection might not have been good for his long-term prospects. Still, while his work may not be to everyone’s tastes, he did leave behind a lot of buildings which… aren’t boring.
…and if you enjoyed the slight detour into pub architecture, you may like…
