Pugin was married twice by the time he was twenty-one, took to the sea, was ship-wrecked, and thereafter habitually wore a sailor’s uniform complete with jack boots. He converted to Catholicism in 1835 at a time when the Roman church was still seen as ‘the sinister machine of cruel controls’. When a fellow traveller saw Pugin cross himself in a railway carriage, she shrieked ‘You are a Catholic, sir; Guard, Guard, let me out – I must get into another carriage!‘3 This was the subversive who was to create the architectural exemplar of a nation’s values: Pugin saw gothic as nothing less than ‘an answer to current social and cultural crises’.4

In October 1834 the old Palace of Westminster had been destroyed by fire, and a competition was held to decide who should be assigned its reconstruction. It was stipulated that only the gothic style was appropriate for ‘a great national monument’.5 Charles Barry engaged Pugin as his assistant to prepare his entry for the competition, and won the commission. The foundations were laid in 1837, and building began in 1840. It would take another twenty years to complete, at a cost of £2 million. Although the argument about how far he was responsible for Parliament’s exterior has never been conclusively settled (as if its worrisome debate were an aesthetic corollary to the political debate within), it is certain that it was Pugin who gave the building its detail, designing even its ink-pots and umbrella stands. It was Pugin who was responsible for ‘the instantaneously convincing antiquity of the new place, and its glorious, intimidating magnificence as it rose over flat, marshy, low-built Westminster in the 1840s’ 6

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