It was the personal church of Augustus Pugin, the renowned nineteenth-century architect, designer, and reformer.

This is the site where Pugin is buried, in a vault beneath the chantry chapel he designed, alongside several members of his family.

"[1] Pugin bought the site in 1843 and immediately planned to build a church, to be constructed after he had built his home there.

The next year he began construction of St Augustine's, and gave it to the Vicar Apostolic of the London District on 19 November 1846.

[4] Pugin's attraction to Ramsgate was grounded in his Aunt Selina, his love of the sea (he particularly liked sailing) and his devotion to St Augustine of Canterbury.

"[citation needed] Although St Augustine's is now considered to be close to the centre of Ramsgate, in the mid-nineteenth century Pugin's land was on the western edge of the town.

His painting A True Prospect shows countryside surrounding the site: in fact, these areas had already been laid out in building plots which were being sold, but St Augustine's was initially on the edge of the town.

This enterprise closed soon after Pugin discovered that the children were stealing his coal, though it later became part of St Augustine's College run by the monks.

[citation needed] On 19 November 1846 Pugin gave the whole project legally to the Vicar Apostolic of the London District.

The owner, Matthew Habershon, had a dislike of Pugin and made him pay a large amount of money for the land, £450 (the plot for St Augustine's and The Grange had been £700).

Habershon then built Chartham Terrace on his own plot – a tall building that deliberately attempted to cut out light from Pugin's window.

[7] Chartham Terrace, despite its similarity to St Augustine's with its knapped flint exterior, is not a Pugin building.

This whole collection of buildings models Pugin's ideas of what constitutes a good society, based on an understanding of the Middle Ages with the local community served in education, healthcare, spiritual care, and employment by a monastery and benefactors, all based around a church.

In 1856, monks were invited by Bishop Thomas Grant of the Archdiocese of Southwark to make a foundation in Ramsgate.

Dom Wilfrid Alcock, an Englishman who had become a monk in Italy, was sent by the Subiaco Congregation of the Benedictine Order to found the monastery in Ramsgate.

The priests of the Oxford Oratory donated a relic believed to be part of a bone from St Augustine.

Here Pugin ran a free school for Ramsgate's poor children, and later St Augustine's College used this space.

Along its north wall is a set of painted terracotta Stations of the Cross, made by Alois de Beule in 1893.

There is a memorial brass to the first abbot of Ramsgate, Wilfrid Alcock, who died and is buried in New Zealand.

This was donated by Viscountess Southwell in 1893 to mark the coming of age of her son, who had been educated here at the monks' school.

This was built as the burial place of the celebrated Victorian writer, Catholic convert, and friend of Pugin, Kenelm Henry Digby.

Digby brought the skull of an early Christian martyr, St Benignus, to this chapel and it was installed here on 25 June 1859.

The word nave comes from the Latin navis because the Church is metaphorically a ship sailing people towards Christ.

Above, in the tracery lights, put in by Pugin in 1849, are King Saint Louis of France and angels bearing censers.

He was buried in a small chapel on the north side of his monastery church outside the city walls in Canterbury.

Kings, queens, nobles, clergy, monks, nuns, and countless ordinary people came to pay homage to St Augustine, who was called "Apostle of the English.