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Pugin’s Small Houses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Rosemary Hill
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Extract

This is the first study devoted to Pugin’s small houses. Here ‘small’ is intended to describe any house which does not aspire, either in scale or style, to the country house or mansion. Where these buildings have been considered before it has been in the context of surveys of Pugin’s work in general, or of all of it that was not ecclesiastical. He has been considered primarily as a church architect and such was indeed the case for most of his career, but this perception of him has been exaggerated because he wrote little about his secular and domestic work. It was in the later part of his life, when he published less, that his ideas about domestic architecture matured.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 46 , 2003 , pp. 147 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2003

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References

Notes

1 The principal accounts are in: Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Early Victorian Architecture in Britain (New Haven, 1954)Google Scholar; Stanton, Phoebe, Pugin (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Wedgwood, Alexandra, ‘Domestic Architecture’, in Pugin, A Gothic Passion, ed. Atterbury, Paul and Wainwright, Clive (New Haven and London, 1994)Google Scholar.

2 Drawings and correspondence relating to Pugin’s designs for Dartington Hall of 1845, Devon County Record Office, Exeter. Ref: 215/37/15/1-2; Drawings for Hornby Castle (1847), are in West Yorkshire Archives, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Leeds. Ref: DD5/26/27.

3 Pugin, A. Welby, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (London, 1843), p. 38 Google Scholar.

4 On A. C. Pugin’s life and career see Hill, Rosemary, ‘Bankers, Bawds and Beau Monde’, Country Life, 3 November 1994, pp. 64–67 Google Scholar, and ‘A. C. Pugin’, The Burlington Magazine, No. 1114 (January 1996), pp. 11-19.

5 Letter in a private collection, on microfilm in the House of Lords Record Office, Special Collection 339/315. Here and throughout original spelling and punctuation have been preserved.

6 For example (and influentially) Girouard, Mark, The Victorian Country House (Oxford, 1971), p. 30 Google Scholar: ‘Pugin was in direct reaction to the picturesque movement, and pronounced two iconoclastic doctrines: that plan came before appearance, and that buildings should be what they seemed.’

7 Buckler, John Chessell, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Royal Palace at Uitham (London, 1828), p. 3 Google Scholar.

8 The Pugins certainly knew the Bucklers, they were more than once to be found drawing and describing the same buildings at the same time.

9 Buckler, Royal Palace at Eltham, p. 3.

10 See Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, pp. 63,223, 231, 232; Stanton, Pugin, pp. 14-18, and Wedgwood, ‘Domestic Architecture’, pp. 43-45, which includes a ground plan. Also Pevsner, Nikolaus and Cherry, Bridget, The Buildings of England, Wiltshire, 2nd edition (London, 1975), pp. 83–84 Google Scholar.

11 Letter to Edward James Willson, 1 January 1835, published in The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, vol. 1, 1830 to 1842, ed. Belcher, Margaret (Oxford, 2001), p. 45 Google Scholar.

12 A. C. Pugin, see above n. 5.

13 Repton, H., Esq., Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening including some remarks on Grecian and Gothic architecture (London, 1803), p. 162 Google Scholar.

14 Ibid.

15 Ferrey, Benjamin, Recollections of Pugin, with an introduction by Wainwright, Clive and an index by Wainwright, Jane (London, 1978), p. 73 Google Scholar.

16 Various correspondents in the Salisbury and Wiltshire Herald, 26 September [2] and 8 October [2] 1836.

17 Letter published in the Salisbury and Winchester Journal, [2] 26 September 1836.

18 For the broader development of Pugin’s ideas on this and other points see ‘Pugin and Ruskin’, Hill, Rosemary, British Art Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Spring/Summer 2001), pp. 39–45 Google Scholar.

19 Letter to John Weale, 6 August 1842, Letters, p. 373.

20 Loudon’s Architectural Magazine, 4 (March 1837), p. 145. The notice is unsigned but must surely be, as suggested by Belcher, Margaret, (in A. W. N. Pugin: an annotated critical bibliography (London and New York, 1987), p. 164)Google Scholar written by Pugin.

21 Drawings in the RIBA, PUGIN [64] 11.

22 Loudon, J. C., An Encyclopaedia of Cottage Farm and Village Architecture, new edition (London, 1835), p. 230 Google Scholar.

23 Letter, 13 September 1840 to John Rouse Bloxam, Letters, p. 142. Although ‘Rectory’ was a medieval term, Pugin seems to have felt it was a solecism as he never used it again for a Catholic presbytery.

24 Idem.

25 Pugin, Augustus and Willson, E. J., Specimens of Gothic Architecture, Vol. 1 (London, 1822), p. 4 Google Scholar.

26 Idem.

27 Pevsner describes the schoolmaster’s house as an adaptation of ‘two existing cottages’ (The Buildings of England, Staffordshire (London, 1974), p. 60). I would suggest that only one was existing and the other was Pugin’s addition.

28 Pugin had yet to formulate his True Principles when he built the presbytery, but it is such a flagrant breach of them that Phoebe Stanton assumed the house had been refaced (Stanton, Pugin, p. 198). This monolithic view of Pugin as a theorist has often obstructed analysis of his work.

29 Drawings in the Getty Center, Los Angeles, Ref. 870366/1-8.

30 Hill, ‘A. C. Pugin’, p. 15.

31 Pugin, A. C., quoted in Scott, George Gilbert, Remarks on Secular & Domestic Architecture (London, 1857), p. 167 Google Scholar.

32 Pevsner, Nikolaus, The Buildings of England, North Somerset (London, 1995), p. 319 Google Scholar.

33 For Pugin’s fluctuating attitude to the importance of national traditions in architecture see Hill, ‘Pugin and Ruskin’.

34 Drawings in the RIBA Collection, PUGIN [55].

35 Pugin, A. Welby, The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England (London, 1843), pp. 98 and 102Google Scholar.

36 Demolished, but illustrated in Building News, 52 (11 March 1887), p. 352.

37 Illustrated in Thompson, Paul, William Butterfield (London, 1971)Google Scholar, fig. 341.

38 A. Welby Pugin, An Apology, pp. 38-39.

39 Ibid., p. 50. For the full significance of the idea of ‘development’ in Victorian architecture and theology see Hall, Michael, ‘What do Victorian Churches Mean?’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 59:1 (March 2000), pp. 76–95 Google Scholar, and Brownlee, David B., ‘The first High Victorians: British Architectural Theory in the 1840s’, Architectura, 15 (1985), pp. 33–46 Google Scholar.

40 A. Welby Pugin, The Present State, pp. 78 and 108.

41 Letter from John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury to Daniel Rock, 21 December 1844, Southwark Archdiocesan Archives, uncatalogued.

42 ‘Mr Pugin on Christian Art’, a letter to Herbert, J. R. in The Builder, 3 (2 August 1845), p. 367 Google Scholar.

43 The oriel may be another development of the Vicars’ Close model or, Gavin Stamp suggests, of that at Great Chalfield Manor, Wiltshire, drawn by T. L. Walker for the last volume of A. C. Pugin, Examples of Gothic Architecture, published posthumously in 1836.

44 Entry for 26 October 1846. The diaries of Charles Barry Junior, 1846-April 1847, are in a private collection. Microfilm copy in the House of Lords Record Office.

45 The research for a conservation plan, undertaken in 2000 for the Landmark Trust by Paul Drury FSA, yielded many important insights into the original design and construction of the Grange and I am indebted to it for the account in this article.

46 Franklin, Jill, The Gentleman’s Country House and its Plan 1815-1914 (London, 1981), p. 2 Google Scholar.

47 Scott, M. H. Baillie, Houses and Gardens (London, 1906), p. 10 Google Scholar.

48 Muthesius, Hermann, The English House (Berlin, 1904-05), (English edition, ed. Sharp, Dennis, Albans, St, 1979), p.203 Google Scholar.

49 Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, p. 232.

50 Diary of Charles Barry Junior.

51 For a brief discussion see Hill, Rosemary, ‘Pugin’s domestic interiors’, The Victorian, 11 November 2002, pp. 4–9 Google Scholar.

52 Franklin, The Gentleman’s Country House, p. 39.

53 Eastlake, Charles L., A History of the Gothic Revival (London, 1872), p. 164 Google Scholar. The improper implications of so many doors opening off a single space were taken up by Ben Travers who exploited them in his farce Rookery Nook, inspiring Osbert Lancaster to characterize the middle-class living hall as the ‘Aldwych Farcical’ style in Home Sweet Home, 1939.

54 Baillie Scott, Houses and Gardens, p. 9.

55 ‘Pugin in his home’, A memoir by Powell, J. H., ed. Wedgwood, Alexandra, Architectural History, 31 (1988), p. 175 Google Scholar. See also Saint, Andrew, Richard Norman Shaw (London, 1976), p. 34 Google Scholar.

56 Undated letter to John Hardman (c. March 1845), private collection on microfilm in the House of Lords Record Office, Special Collections, 304/951.

57 Undated letter, c. 1846 House of Lords Record Office, 304/559.

58 They are: Oswald Croft, Childwall, Liverpool, 1844; Camelford Rectory, Llanteglos by Camelford, Cornwall, 1846 (executed without Pugin’s supervision); Burton Closes, Derbyshire, 1846, alterations within an existing house (later extensions by E. W. Pugin); Bilton Grange, Rugby, Warwickshire, 1844-46, an extension. The new building was originally designed on the model of the Grange, but was built differently. Wilburton Manor, Wilburton, Cambridgeshire, 1847 (designs supplied by Pugin but executed without his supervision).

59 This point is made by Paul Drury in his report.

60 George Gilbert Scott, in his Secular & Domestic Architecture, p. 37, argued that pointed windows were ‘always admissable’, but the general trend in domestic architecture went with Pugin and Butterfield from the 1860S onwards.

61 Drawings and correspondence in the Gloucestershire Record Office, GRO D1101 and D2258/1-8, and the Yale Center for British Art, MS/Pugin/222-233.

62 Quoted in Franklin, The Gentleman’s Country House, pp. 3-4.

63 Sketchbook in the British Museum, 199.b.17.

64 Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, p. 144.

65 Idem.

66 Thompson, Butterfield, p. 405.

67 Quoted in Andrew Saint, ‘Pugin’s Architecture in Context’, in Pugin, A. W. N., Master of Gothic Revival, ed. Atterbury, Paul (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 97 Google Scholar.

68 Ibid., p. 98.

69 Quoted in Simpson, Duncan, C. F. A. Voysey, an architect of individuality (London, 1979), p. 51 Google Scholar.

70 Baillie Scott, Houses and Gardens, p. 6.

71 Ibid., p. 2.

72 Idem.