A life on the waves

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2004 by Sutherland Lyall

Pugin is one of the great British architectural heroes so I shouldn't have been so surprised to discover the Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin 1812-1852 site at www.pugin.com. It's a treasure trove and, boy, is it fast. There is just one page, which is not an especially bad thing. Nor is the fact that it is composed almost entirely of links. These are links to his buildings in various counties, to his personal and professional history and the background of the times. You click on, say, Alton Castle and up pops a page with five small but readable images. Back to 'Pugin the Man' and there are three of them. I mention images because there is no hanging about with little horizontal meters or coy little clocks. Click and uh! there you are: three to five pristine images on the screen. The site is the work of Victoria Farrow for the Pugin Society. Mike Farrow was the builder. I'm not inquiring which was responsible for the visual design because it would have had old Pugin spinning in his grave as would the quality of the text. But you really want to forgive the amateurishness because of the speed and what seems to be the completeness of the coverage. Maybe if the big thumbnails were expandable, maybe if the rules round every bit of image and text were replaced by some other graphic device--or none, maybe if the home page dispensed with the cover of John Harries biography of Pugin ... But you especially want the pointless animated cantering horse and gig to be replaced by an animation of Pugin steering his wrecker, The Caroline, out to the Goodwin Sands to collect salvage. A small group of us has always supported the idea that Pugin made his serious money from looting ships lost off Ramsgate where he had built his Grange. Now, from this site, we are pretty sure we were right.

Sutherland Lyall rummages through his bulging sack of cyber goodies to bring readers some festive cheer.