Pugin in Ramsgate: The Grange and the Church He Built Himself

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin designed the interiors of the Palace of Westminster, wrote the books that made Gothic revival an argument rather than a style, and died at forty. For the last decade of his life he lived in Ramsgate, in a house he designed for himself, next to a church he built with his own money and is buried in.

Both buildings stand on the West Cliff. Neither is a grand public commission, and that is exactly why they matter: this is the only place where Pugin built for Pugin, without a client, a committee or a budget set by somebody else.

Why Ramsgate

He had known the coast since childhood, and he had a long attachment to the sea that went well beyond the picturesque. He owned boats, sailed seriously, and was involved in rescue work off this shore. A man who designed cathedrals also knew how to handle a lugger in bad weather, which is not a combination the profession produces often.

The other reason was historical and, for him, decisive. Augustine landed in Thanet in 597, and the conversion of England began within sight of this coast. For a Catholic convert who had spent his career arguing that England’s true architecture was its medieval Catholic architecture, building on the ground where English Christianity started was not a coincidence to be enjoyed. It was the point.

He bought land on the cliff in the early 1840s and began with the house.

The Grange

The Grange was built between 1843 and 1844 and it is a strange, important building. Pugin planned it from the inside out: the rooms were arranged for how the household would actually live, and the exterior was allowed to follow, with windows where rooms needed them rather than where symmetry demanded them.

That sounds obvious now. It was not obvious in 1843, when a gentleman’s house was expected to present a balanced facade to the road whatever went on behind it. The Grange is one of the buildings where the modern idea that plan should govern elevation gets worked out in practice.

It has a tower, from which he could watch the sea and the shipping. It has a private chapel. The detailing runs to wallpaper, tiles, metalwork and furniture, all designed by him, because he thought a building was a single argument and could not be half made.

The house passed out of family hands, went through institutional use and decline, and was restored by the Landmark Trust. It is now let as holiday accommodation, which means the building is occupied and maintained rather than roped off, and that people can stay in it.

The church of St Augustine

Next to the house he built the church, and he paid for it himself. That is the fact that reframes everything else about him.

Pugin spent his career designing churches for other people’s money, constrained by what patrons would fund and by the compromises that follow. St Augustine’s was the one where nobody could tell him no. It is built of Kentish flint and stone, on a plan he chose, with the proportions he wanted, and it was still unfinished when he died in 1852.

The intended tower and spire were never completed, and the church stands without them. There is something appropriate in that: the one building he controlled entirely is also the one that shows most plainly that he ran out of time.

He is buried in the chantry chapel, alongside members of his family. A working parish church rather than a monument, it remains in use.

What Pugin was arguing

The buildings make more sense alongside the writing. Contrasts, published in 1836, set medieval and modern buildings side by side on facing pages and let the comparison do the work: a medieval almshouse against a Victorian workhouse, a medieval town against the same town industrialised. It was a polemic about society disguised as a book about architecture, and it was extraordinarily effective.

The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture followed in 1841 and made the case in positive terms. Two rules run through it. A building should have no features not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; and all ornament should consist of the enrichment of the essential construction.

Strip the Gothic vocabulary from those and what remains is close to the functionalist argument that modernism would make a century later against everything Pugin stood for stylistically. That irony is well recognised and it is not accidental.

Westminster

The Palace of Westminster is the work he is known for and the one that most obscures him. Charles Barry won the competition and was the architect of the building. Pugin drew the Gothic detail, inside and out, across an enormous scheme, and did much of it in the last years of his life while simultaneously running his own practice.

The division of credit was disputed after both men died and was argued about for decades. The reasonable summary is that the plan and the overall composition are Barry’s and the Gothic character is Pugin’s, and that neither would have produced that building alone.

The volume and pressure of the work contributed to his collapse. He was committed to an asylum in 1852, released to Ramsgate, and died at the house within weeks, aged forty.

The family, and what followed

Pugin was married three times and widowed twice, and the household at The Grange was large. His son Edward Welby Pugin took over the practice at fourteen and ran it for the rest of his life, completing work his father had left and building extensively in his own right, including in Ramsgate. Two more sons, Cuthbert and Peter Paul, continued the firm afterwards.

That succession is why the town holds more Pugin work than one short life could account for, and why attribution locally needs care. A Gothic building in Ramsgate is quite likely to be by a Pugin. It is much less likely to be by the Pugin.

Edward’s own career was turbulent, involving disputes over the Westminster credit and a bankruptcy, and he died at forty-one, a year younger than his father. The dynasty produced an enormous body of Victorian Catholic architecture across Britain and Ireland in two generations and then effectively stopped.

The lifeboat and the sea

The sailing was not a hobby he fitted around the work. Pugin kept a boat at Ramsgate and took part in rescues off this coast, in an era when that meant an open boat, oars and sail, and no engine to get home against the weather.

The Goodwin Sands lie a few miles offshore, and they have wrecked ships for as long as ships have passed. Ramsgate’s harbour existed substantially because of them: a refuge on a coast that badly needed one. A man living on the cliff above it, with a tower to watch from and a boat in the harbour, was not decorating his life with a maritime theme.

It matters for reading the buildings because it explains the tower, the orientation, and a certain practicality in a body of work usually discussed in terms of theology and ornament. He knew what weather did to a building on this cliff because he had been out in it.

Reading the buildings

Two habits make the Ramsgate buildings legible to somebody with no architectural training.

Look at what the ornament is doing. Pugin’s rule was that decoration should enrich structure rather than be applied to it, so the carved and moulded work sits on the parts that carry load: the capitals, the arch mouldings, the roof timbers. Where a Victorian building has ornament stuck onto a flat surface for effect, it is not following him.

Then look at the plan from outside. The Grange announces its rooms. A bay projects because the room behind it wanted a bay; the chapel reads as a chapel from the garden; the tower exists because somebody wanted to see the sea. Nothing is arranged to make the elevation balance, and once that is noticed the building stops looking eccentric and starts looking deliberate.

Seeing it now

The church is open to visitors, run as a parish church with a visitor welcome rather than as a museum operation. The Grange is a Landmark Trust property and can be stayed in, with occasional open days providing access for those not renting it.

The pairing is the thing. A house and a church, designed by the same man for himself, standing next to one another on a cliff, both of them arguments he was making in stone. There is nowhere else that this particular architect can be read that directly.

The other Pugin building in the town, the Catholic church he did not build, is a common confusion: many Ramsgate churches are Victorian and Gothic without being his. The one to look for carries the dedication to Augustine, which was never an accident of naming.

Both buildings are listed at the highest grade, which constrains what can be done to them and is the reason the restoration took as long and cost as much as it did. That protection is worth understanding as a trade: it has kept the interiors intact, and it is also why neither building can be adapted freely to modern use.

Frequently asked questions

Did Pugin design the Houses of Parliament?

He designed the Gothic detailing, interiors and fittings across the building. Charles Barry was the architect responsible for the plan and overall composition. The credit was disputed after both men died.

Can The Grange be visited?

It is owned by the Landmark Trust and let as holiday accommodation, so it can be stayed in. Open days provide access at intervals for those not renting.

Who paid for St Augustine's Church?

Pugin himself. It is the only major church he built entirely on his own terms and at his own expense, which is why it is the clearest statement of what he actually wanted.

Why is the church tower unfinished?

He died in 1852 before the intended tower and spire were completed, and they were never added.

Why did he choose Ramsgate?

A long attachment to the sea and to sailing, and the historical significance of the coast where Augustine landed in 597, which mattered a great deal to a Catholic convert whose life’s argument was about England’s medieval religious architecture.