VIVAT PUGIN!

God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain
by Rosemary Hill, Penguin Allen Lane, £30.00 ISBN 071 399 4991

It is extremely exciting to think that on August 2nd this new biography, the first for over seventy years, of Augustus Pugin was published. All the time Pugin's fame is growing. The Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, Pugin: A Gothic Passion was held in 1994, in 1995 the Pugin Society was founded, and in 2006 the Landmark Trust completed the restoration of the Grange, the house at Ramsgate which Pugin designed and built, and in which he lived. Earlier this year Channel 4's Time Team Special programme on the house gave massive publicity to the restoration.

Now, Society Committee member Rosemary Hill, acclaimed critic, writer and historian, has crowned these achievements with a brilliant and perceptive account of the colourful, sometimes sad, but always gripping life of Augustus Pugin. Enthusiasts will now not only be able to visit the house of Pugin but really get to know the man himself, to an unprecedented degree. God's Architect has been receiving exceptional reviews. Watch out for a major one by Pugin expert Dr Margaret Belcher in our own True Principles this autumn.

En Avant indeed, in the words of Pugin's motto!

SALISBURY SALUTES AWN PUGIN

Member Peter Blacklock writes:

Civic leaders were joined by Mgr Jeremy Rigden, as vicar-general the most important person after the bishop in the Clifton RC diocese, and about a hundred other people to pay tribute to Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin at his St Osmund's Church, Salisbury, built in 1847-8. The service of thanksgiving was held on June 6, the anniversary of Pugin's conversion to Catholicism in the city in 1835, and a Civic Society blue plaque was unveiled at the door to the building.

The mayor and mayoress led the worshippers, and they were joined by Mrs Bobbie Chettleburgh, chairman of Salisbury District Council. Others there included Brigadier Alistair Clark, chairman of the Civic Society, and Dr Beth Robertson, chairman of the Rotary Club. After the service Dr John Elliott, a director of Spire Books and former lecturer on the nineteenth century at Reading University, gave a talk assessing Pugin's importance in the Victorian pantheon of architects and a party was held in the church garden, where there are a number of gravestones, including that of Sir John Lambert, Pugin's close friend who paid for the building of St Osmund's. Sir John was the first Catholic mayor of Salisbury since the Reformation.

The service produced some ironies. The vicar-general preached on Pugin's merits from a modern pulpit, which had replaced Pugin's original stone one, at a time when his standing was low. Salisbury Cathedral, which had at one time banned the controversial Pugin from its building, sent representatives to the service. Finally, the congregation sang a hymn ‚ 'Firmly I believe and truly' ‚ by Cardinal John Henry Newman, one of Pugin's severest critics within the Catholic Church.

In these ecumenical days, however, we realise that our subject, Pugin, is more important than our differences. Warm congratulations to all those people in Salisbury who succeeded in bringing the final placing of this plaque to fruition - Ed.