William Wilkinson Wardell (1823-1899) was the eldest son of a
baker in Poplar, East London. His parents subsequently became
Master and Matron of the Poplar Union Workhouse, in which he and
his siblings grew up — albeit in the staff quarters.
Understandably, perhaps, Wardell and his descendants were
reluctant to speak of these years, and his early career is known
only in outline. Very briefly, after an episode at sea he was
indentured to a civil engineer and surveyor, and then entered
the office of an architect and surveyor in Clerkenwell, working
his way up to becoming a respected architect in his own right.
As a young man, he fell under the spell of A. W. N. Pugin, whose
views encouraged him in his love of medieval buildings. Along
perhaps with those of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement,
Pugin's views probably also inspired him to convert to Roman
Catholicism. He took this momentous step in 1844, when he was
still only twenty years old (see Evans 35, Egan 57). Pugin would
serve as a lifelong mentor: