God's Architect

God's Architect

Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain

Summary

Pugin was one of Britain’s greatest architects and his short career one of the most dramatic in architectural history. Born in 1812, the son of the soi-disant Comte de Pugin, at 15 Pugin was working for King George IV at Windsor Castle. By the time he was 21 he had been shipwrecked, bankrupted and widowed. Nineteen years later he died, insane and disillusioned, having changed the face and the mind of British architecture.

God’s Architect is the first full modern biography of this extraordinary figure. It draws on thousands of unpublished letters and drawings to recreate his life and work as architect, propagandist and romantic artist as well as the turbulent story of his three marriages, the bitterness of his last years and his sudden death at 40. It is the debut of a remarkable historian and biographer.

Reviews

  • a very remarkable book about a very remarkable man
    A.N. Wilson

About the author

Rosemary Hill

Rosemary Hill is a writer and historian. Her biography, God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (2007) won the Wolfson History Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Elizabeth Longford Prize and the Marsh Biography Award. In 2008 she published a prize-winning study of Stonehenge and its cultural legacy. She is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, a visiting professor at the University of York, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society of Literature, and a quondam fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Learn More

More from this Author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more