Rosemary Hill | God's Architect | The Grange (2007)

[Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect, Pugin & the Building of Romantic Britain, Allen Lane, Penguin, 2007] “[133] … Pugin intended his home to be a manifesto. It marked the start of a new life, a new profession and a new faith. It was the first demonstration of his vision of the Gothic as a revived, living style. To the astonishment and often undisguised mirth of passers-by a turreted, fortified, red-brick house, apparently blown out of the pages of the book of hours, began to rise rapidly next to the main Southhampton road. The Grange, which though altered still survives, was the fruit of Pugin’s peculiar education, a mixture of Picturesque cottage and fifteenth-century house. In designing it he took the theories of Price and Repton and applied them with a radical logic. …. [133] …. [134] There was no visible door and no window. Not only was the façade blank, it was defended. Between the raised ground floor and the road there was a dry moat with a working drawbridge, overlooked by a watchtower. No other architect, however strictly Picturesque, would have had such a disregard for convention as to present a brick wall to the outside world. But Pugin had no hesitation. It was an eloquent gesture, for his house was both a retreat from the world and an assault on it. 

After his parents’ death Pugin was increasingly prey to nightmares, fear of burglary and other fears, less rational: the paraphernalia of the Gothic, in all its most clichéd forms, ghosts, sleepwalkers and all the assembled terrors of the night. His fortified house expressed his subjective dread, and also his strong streak of self-dramatization. The thickness of the walls, three feet, he told Wilson, the moat, the lookout, were more necessary for his peace of mind than physical safety.

 He went so far as to conceal the well, as was common in the Middle Ages, to prevent tampering by enemies. Like a medieval jewel case, the Grange was rebarbative on the outside while within all was to be richness, intimacy and glowing colour. …. [134] …. Servants, whose kitchen and scullery were on the lower ground floor, would use the same entrance as the family. It was a highly eccentric domestic arrangement. …. [134] .... The high-pitched roofs with gilded weather vanes and cresting, the stone casement windows with mullions instead of wooden sashes, made the house conspicuous and, to many people, ridiculous. Pugin chose red brick because he could not afford stone, and red brick had many medieval precedents, but to most people in Georgian England it was principally associated with modern warehouses and factory workers’ cottages. …. [135] …. This first house was a work of romantic art, a building with which its creator was entirely, subjectively identified. 

 In it Gothic was realized as a total, organizing belief, running through both conception and construction, the appearance of the building and the kind of life that would be lived in it. This, Pugin believed, was what architecture could and should do. It was his own answer to the questions being debated in London about the design of the new Parliament, his personal attempt to mould ‘the intellect of the age’ …. [135] …. In one sense it was not an important building, for it influenced nobody. Ferry thought it ‘tended rather to show the eccentricity of its owner than his superior skill in design’, and even a sympathetic Nikolaus Pevsner diagnosed it as ‘a case of extreme medievalism’ Yet while it remains to some extent a cul-de-sac in English architecture, it was prescient, not least in the elements of its design that seemed most scandalous to Georgian eyes. ….” [135]