Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin[a] (/ˈpjuːdʒɪn/ PEW-jin; 1 March 1812 – 14 September 1852) was an English architect, designer, artist and critic with French and Swiss origins.

As a child, his mother took Pugin each Sunday to the services of the fashionable Scottish Presbyterian preacher Edward Irving (later the founder of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church), at his chapel in Cross Street, Hatton Garden, Camden, London.

[8] He also developed an interest in sailing, and briefly commanded a small merchant schooner trading between Great Britain and Holland, which allowed him to import examples of furniture and carving from Flanders, with which he later furnished his house at Ramsgate in Kent.

[9] During one voyage in 1830, he was wrecked on the Scottish coast near Leith,[10] as a result of which he came into contact with Edinburgh architect James Gillespie Graham, who advised him to abandon seafaring for architecture.

[11] He then established a business supplying historically accurate carved wood and stone detailing for the increasing number of buildings being constructed in the Gothic Revival style, but the enterprise quickly failed.

Following his second marriage in 1833, Pugin moved to Salisbury, Wiltshire, with his wife,[14] and in 1835 bought one-half of an acre (0.20 ha) of land in Alderbury, about one and a half miles (2.4 km) outside the town.

In 1832 he made the acquaintance of John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, a Catholic sympathetic to his aesthetic theory and who employed him in alterations and additions to his residence of Alton Towers, which subsequently led to many more commissions.

In 1836, Pugin published Contrasts, a polemical book which argued for the revival of the medieval Gothic style, and also "a return to the faith and the social structures of the Middle Ages".

In one example, Pugin contrasted a medieval monastic foundation, where monks fed and clothed the needy, grew food in the gardens – and gave the dead a decent burial – with "a panopticon workhouse where the poor were beaten, half-starved and sent off after death for dissection.

King's College London was shown from an unflatteringly skewed angle, while Christ Church, Oxford, was edited to avoid showing its famous Tom Tower because that was by Christopher Wren and so not medieval.

[23] He sold St Marie's Grange at a considerable financial loss,[24] and moved temporarily to Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, London.

He had, however, already purchased a parcel of land at West Cliff, Ramsgate, Thanet in Kent, where he proceeded to build for himself a large house and, at his own expense, a church dedicated to St Augustine, after whom he thought himself named.

Pugin visited Italy in 1847; his experience there confirmed his dislike of Renaissance and Baroque architecture, but he found much to admire in the medieval art of northern Italy.Pugin was a prolific designer of stained glass.

In February 1852, while travelling with his son Edward by train, Pugin had a total breakdown and arrived in London unable to recognise anyone or speak coherently.

At that time, Bethlem Hospital was opposite St George's Cathedral, Southwark, one of Pugin's major buildings, where he had married his third wife, Jane, in 1848.

Jane and a doctor removed Pugin from Bedlam and took him to a private house in Hammersmith where they attempted therapy, and he recovered sufficiently to recognise his wife.

Pugin's biographer, Rosemary Hill, suggests that, in the last year of his life, he had had hyperthyroidism which would account for his symptoms of exaggerated appetite, perspiration, and restlessness.

Hill writes that Pugin's medical history, including eye problems and recurrent illness from his early twenties, suggests that he contracted syphilis in his late teens, and this may have been the cause of his death at the age of 40.

Subsequently, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, wanted, now that he was premier, to disassociate himself from the controversial John Wilson Croker, who was a founding member of the Athenaeum Club; a close associate of the pre-eminent neoclassical architects James Burton and Decimus Burton; an advocate of neoclassicism; and a repudiator of the gothic revival style.

[29] Subsequent to the announcement of the design ascribed to Barry, William Richard Hamilton, who had been secretary to Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin during the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles, published a pamphlet in which he censured the fact that 'gothic barbarism' had been preferred to the masterful designs of Ancient Greece and Rome:[29] but the judgement was not altered, and was ratified by the Commons and the Lords.

[30]: 147 During the competition for the design of the new Houses of Parliament, Decimus Burton, 'the land's leading classicist',[30]: 83  was vituperated with continuous invective, which Guy Williams has described as an 'anti-Burton campaign',[30]: 129  by the foremost advocate of the neo-gothic style, Augustus W.N.

[30]: 75  Pugin attempted to popularize advocacy of the neo-gothic, and repudiation of the neoclassical, by composing and illustrating books that contended the supremacy of the former and the degeneracy of the latter, which were published from 1835.

In 1845, Pugin, in his Contrasts: or a Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, which the author had to publish himself as a consequence of the extent of the defamation of society architects therein, satirized John Nash as "Mr Wash, Plasterer, who jobs out Day Work on Moderate Terms", and Decimus Burton as "Talent of No Consequence, Premium Required", and included satirical sketches of Nash's Buckingham Palace and Burton's Wellington Arch.

In her biography, Hill quotes Pugin as writing of what is probably his best-known building: "I never worked so hard in my life [as] for Mr Barry for tomorrow I render all the designs for finishing his bell tower & it is beautiful & I am the whole machinery of the clock.

Charles Eastlake, writing in 1872, noted that the quality of construction in Pugin's buildings was often poor, and believed he was lacking in technical knowledge, his strength lying more in his facility as a designer of architectural detail.

"[44] Nonetheless, Pugin's architectural ideas were carried forward by two young architects who admired him and had attended his funeral, W. E. Nesfield and Norman Shaw.

[28] In Street's office, Philip Webb met William Morris and they went on to become leading members of the English Arts and Crafts Movement.