This blog provides a brief summary of a longer article to be published in November 2023 by the Sarum Chronicle, and a detailed publication planned for later in 2024, regarding Augustus Pugin's time in Salisbury, early in his career, where a number of significant achievements were to prove the foundation for so much of what he went on to achieve.
Augustus Pugin was England’s most influential architect and designer of the mid 19th Century, and the early leader of the Victorian Gothic Revival. Early in his architectural career, during the winter of 1834-35, Pugin moved to Salisbury in Wiltshire. He spent around three years living and working there
During the time he spent in the Wiltshire city, Pugin lived in his first designed and built residence, changed faith to Roman Catholicism, worked on competition-winning plans for the new Houses of Parliament, and published the first edition of what was to be his most controversial and influential book, Contrasts. As will be shown in my forthcoming 2023 article and 2024 publication, his achievements during his time there were so significant that they merit consideration as being more explicitly identified as a defined period of his work: Pugin’s Salisbury Period.