Beyond 'Puginism'

The present work, based on the author’s Pugin Lecture in Ramsgate in

September 2017, addresses a little-explored area of Pugin studies, namely the

way in which, during the final years of his life, AWN Pugin’s ecclesiology

underwent a significant development, possible reasons for which will be

identified. After the opening of St Giles’, Cheadle in 1846, Pugin started to

experiment with various forms of asymmetry, and began to relax his earlier

strict compliance with the rubrical requirements of the Use of Sarum - a

Mediaeval variant of the Roman Rite. Indeed, in the year before his death,

Pugin actually admitted that he had perpetrated ‘great errors in former

time’, maintaining that ‘… our churches should now combine all the beauty

of antiquity with every convenience that modern discovery has suggested,

or altered ecclesiastical discipline requires.’

This was an implicit admission that his earlier conflation of Gothic with

the Use of Sarum (‘Puginism’) had been flawed, and that Gothic could

indeed be validly used in the service of the Tridentine Rite that was then

normative in England, and he actually made proposals as to how the ‘all

seeing, all hearing’ liturgy that the Council of Trent had sought to promote

could be facilitated by reconfiguring the chancels of Gothic churches.

Pugin’s untimely death in 1852, however, prevented him from personally

implementing this paradigm shift, although intimations of it can be detected

in his own church of St Augustine in Ramsgate, which was opened in 1850.

A detailed exposition of this important and fascinating topic, chronicling

Pugin’s own attempt to move beyond ‘Puginism’, is the subject of this

publication.