Augustus Pugin

Augustus Welby Pugin helped design the

Houses of Parliament at Westminster.

Fathered eight kids by three women. 

Served a spell in gaol for debts. Then

converted to Roman Catholicism. The

greatest English architect of his century,

whose sandstone triumph screams Britain

had a French father. Touché. It’s said that

Pugin didn’t make much money from his

mastery of the Gothic. Most of his best

work torn down, abandoned or changed

while he lived. The bastards wanted to

put plaster where Pugin wanted God.

Except in the church in bloody Ramsgate.

That one he had to pay for himself.

They say his genius was in drawings.

Too much the artist, too little the business

man. Then, as the world opened to him,

he went mad at age 40 and died from

exhaustion, just like that other Gothic

prince, Bram Stoker. Today we think

that quite young. But then we never

laid the cornerstone for the British Empire.