A.W.N. Pugin and the Gothic Revival: from Westminster to the Victorian home

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852) was the designer and writer who did more than anyone to make Gothic the national style of Victorian Britain. He is best known for the interiors of the Palace of Westminster, where he designed almost everything inside, from the throne in the House of Lords to wallpapers, tiles, door handles and inkstands.

The Gothic Revival was the return of medieval architecture: pointed arches, tracery, steep roofs and carved foliage. Pugin gave it a moral argument. He believed Gothic was honest, Christian architecture, and his writing persuaded a generation of architects, church builders and, eventually, ordinary householders.

Who was Pugin?

Pugin was the son of Auguste Charles Pugin, a French draughtsman who made his living drawing medieval buildings. The son learned to draw Gothic detail as a child and was designing furniture for Windsor Castle as a teenager. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1835, and his faith shaped everything he did after.

His working life was astonishingly short and busy. He designed churches, houses and schools across Britain and Ireland, and died in 1852 aged just forty. His own house, The Grange at Ramsgate, and the church he built beside it, St Augustine's, can both be visited.

The Palace of Westminster

After the old Palace burned down in 1834, Charles Barry won the competition to rebuild it. Barry planned the building; Pugin supplied the Gothic detail and designed the interiors. The House of Lords chamber, with its gilded canopy and throne, is perhaps the richest Gothic Revival room in the country. One of his last designs was the clock tower now called the Elizabeth Tower, home of Big Ben.

The scale of the work was enormous. Pugin produced thousands of drawings for Westminster, often several a day, and many of the patterns he drew there were later sold as wallpapers, tiles and fabrics for ordinary homes. Public tours of the Palace are the easiest way to see his interiors up close.

Pugin worked with a small group of makers to realise his designs: John Hardman for metalwork and stained glass, Herbert Minton for encaustic floor tiles, and John Gregory Crace for painted decoration and wallpapers. That partnership between designer and craftsmen is one of his lasting lessons.

His writing

Pugin's books were as influential as his buildings. In Contrasts (1836) he set drawings of medieval towns beside modern ones to show, rather unfairly, how much had been lost. In The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841) he set out two rules: a building should have no features that are not needed for convenience, construction or propriety, and ornament should enrich the essential construction rather than disguise it.

Pugin's real idea was simple: ornament should grow out of how a thing is made, not be stuck on afterwards.

The Gothic vocabulary

• Pointed arch. The defining shape, used for windows, doorways and even fire surrounds.
• Tracery. Stone or timber patterns in the heads of windows.
• Trefoil and quatrefoil. Three- and four-lobed shapes, used in panels, tiles and wallpaper.
• Crockets and finials. Carved leaves climbing the edges of spires and canopies.
• Stylised foliage. Oak, ivy, vine and other leaves, drawn flat and crisp rather than realistically.
• Heraldry. Fleur-de-lis, Tudor roses and portcullises, all over Westminster.

Gothic Revival in the Victorian home

By the 1850s and 1860s, Gothic had moved from churches into suburban streets. Speculative builders added pointed porches, decorative bargeboards, polychrome brick and stained glass to otherwise ordinary houses. Inside, the influence shows in encaustic tiled hallways, pointed-arch fire surrounds, patterned wallpapers and deep, leafy ceiling decoration.

Pugin would not have approved of all of it. Much was applied ornament of exactly the kind he warned against. But it is the reason so many Victorian terraces have a little medieval flavour, and why Gothic details look so at home in them today. If you live in one, look closely at your tiles and your porch: there is often more Gothic there than you expect. Our history of the Victorian ceiling rose follows the same story overhead.

Bringing a little Gothic home

As a designer, what I take from Pugin is the love of foliage done with conviction. A ceiling rose with deep, carved leaves suits a Victorian room with a Gothic accent far better than a flat modern disc. Keep colours rich: deep red, green and blue walls, with the plaster kept pale so the shadows read.

Our ceiling roses are hand-cast to order in Shrewsbury in natural plaster, and can be painted with ordinary emulsion. Browse the ceiling rose collection, and our guide to painting plaster before you pick up a brush.