A.W.N. Pugin and the Country House

Rosemary Hill, the award-winning biographer of Pugin, discusses a little-known aspect of his work.

The story of Pugin and the country house is the story of the dog that didn’t bark, a significant non-event. Pugin never built a country house, but he worked on and off throughout his career on the Staffordshire estate of his patron the Earl of Shrewsbury at Alton Towers and Alton Castle. In the successes and failures of his efforts there to realise the ideal of a Romantic Catholic Christendom, we see the conception of the late-Georgian country house developed and ultimately transformed into the urban and middle-class building types of the later 19th century. Pugin and Shrewsbury shared a belief in the social and spiritual purpose of architecture but were often at odds about how best to realise it. By considering both men in their time and in their relationship to one another and to architecture it is possible to see how their debates have left their mark not only in some of the country houses of Britain and Ireland but in many Victorian villas and, not least, in the Palace of Westminster.

Rosemary Hill, a former Trustee of the Victorian Society, is the author of the multiple-award winning book, ‘God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic, published in 2007. She is a Trustee of the Pugin Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.