God's Architect : Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (18121852) 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 a French draftsman, 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 in works as revered as the House of Lords and the clock tower at Westminster, known as Big Ben. God's Architectis the first modern biography of this extraordinary figure. Rosemary Hill draws upon thousands of unpublished letters and drawings to re-create Pugin's life and work as architect, propagandist, and Gothic designer, as well as the turbulent story of his three marriages,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 work of an exceptional historian and biographer.

Rosemary Hill is a writer and historian, and has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century cultural history.