A.W.N. Pugin “Improving the taste of young England”

 On September 1st 1846 the opening of St. Giles’ Church Cheadle took place after five years of building and interior design work by Pugin. The Earl of Shrewsbury whose money had largely funded the project was delighted. He thought it would “improve the taste of young England” and could often be found showing people around. George Gilbert Scott was impressed and the Earl of Shrewsbury commented about his reaction “ the stencilling absolutely made the water run down both sides of his mouth”.

St. Giles Church was designed by Pugin to be entirely English in style and was symmetrical. This style no longer reflected his thinking at the time but it was an example of what became known as “Puginism”. The Church cost over thirty thousand pounds and was a full blown work of high romantic art. In it Pugin’s own religious and aesthetic ideals were equally fulfilled. Many notable guests attended the consecration including John Henry Newman, a recent convert from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic faith. Newman was not convinced by what he regarded as the emotionalism of some Roman Catholics. He was horrified at the consecration by the sermon and described it as another of the Bishop’s “steam driven efforts”. Newman and the Oratorians (a post Reformation religious order) supported an English expression of Roman Catholicism and this did not sit easily with Pugin’s emotional Gothic style.

Newman had come from the Church of England and he differed in approach to church architecture as a result. Placing a picture of an Anglican and Gothic Roman Catholic Church Building of a similar age side by side illustrates the marked difference in church building between the two traditions. (Figure 1 below). How would your habits and traditions affect your approach to the design of a building?

Figure 1 St. Giles Cheadle, on the left the Anglican Church and on the right the Roman Catholic one designed by Pugin (with thanks to A Vision of Splendour by Michael Fisher)





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