Crenellated, buttressed, brushed with gold as if gilded by some enormous hand, the Palace of Westminster echoes an era of imperial hubris and muscular Christianity. Surmounted by its phallic tower, housing the national soundtrack of Big Ben’s chimes, this is not the romanticised, subversive gothic of the eighteenth century, all fey decoration and plaster fan vaulting: Pugin’s historical antecedents may have been James Wyatt’s fantastic, nightmarish Fonthill, and Horace Walpole’s equally dreamlike Strawberry Hill, but anything further from that icing-sugar, foppish fantasy up the river at Teddington, where the Thames runs limpid past dropping willows, it would be hard to find. Perhaps, in the process of moving downstream, gothic was infected by imperialism – this was, after all, the same river which would inspire Conrad’s dark heart – metamorphosed into a monstrous development of medieval style. Here, during the Great Stink of 1866, parliamentarians would resort to curtains soaked in disinfectant to mask the appalling smell of sewerage discarded raw into the river. Only when faced with this odorous reminder of the fecal nearness of life and death would the politicans address the problem of their constituents’ ever-burgeoning waste.

And yet there is a sense of decadence to this sprawling institution of state; a spiritual, political, and creative dominance which is overwhelming in its expression: imposing, ornate, self-celebratory. Indeed, its guiding light, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52), was himself a gothic creation, a man whose life, as Richard Davenport-Hines writes, ‘was lived with a spiritual intensity and emotional extravagance which few people could have endured without breaking down. He was turbulent, fantastic, self-destructive, ill-starred and reviled…[and] cast himself back into the soaring glories of medieval Roman Catholic church-building’.1 As such, Pugin seems as extraordinary as the building he created. The son of a Frenchman ‘with obscure aristocratic claims’, the young Pugin had built model theatres in the family home ‘at much expense, removing the attic ceiling, cutting away the roof, constructing cisterns, and adapting everything necessary to his object’, as his biographer, Benjamin Ferrey would write in 1861. ‘On this model stage he designed the most exquisite scenery, with fountains, tricks, traps, drop-scenes, wings, soffites, hilly scenes, flats, open flats and every magic change of which stage mechanism is capable…‘2 It was as if he were rehearsing the future Palace of Westminster as a theatrical backdrop, to be viewed in two-dimensions from the river bank.

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