God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain by
Rosemary Hill Yale University Press, 602 pp., $45.00 In his
brief lifespan as an architect and writer A.W.N. Pugin
transformed the British landscape. By the time he died, insane,
at the age of forty, he had given the great cities of London and
Edinburgh two defining landmarks—”Big Ben,” the clock tower of
the Palace of Westminster, and the spire of the church of
Tolbooth St. John’s. Pugin had set the pattern for the spires
and towers of the Victorian Gothic churches that dominate so
many of the smaller British towns. It was largely due to his
impassioned advocacy that Gothic became the British national
style for nineteenth-century church and civic buildings. He
bequeathed his own name to the particular, evocative, Romantic
British vistas of monastic settlements and crenellated castles
we still describe as “Puginesque.” Few critics have ever doubted
his importance. But defining it precisely has been quite another
thing. Difficulties with Pugin stem