Pugin & Pugin

Pugin & Pugin (fl. 1851–c. 1958) was a London-based family firm of church architects.

The firm was founded with the Westminster, London office of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852). Augustus Pugin was succeeded by his sons Cuthbert Welby Pugin (1840–1928) and Peter Paul Pugin (1851–1904) after the death of their elder brother, Edward Welby Pugin (1834–1875). They were later joined by Sebastian Pugin Powell and Charles Henry Cuthbert Purcell until the latter's death in 1958.^[1]

The firm worked exclusively in the Gothic Revival style, and produced many buildings, alterations and furnishings for the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom, such as the sanctuary of the Sacred Heart Church, Liverpool; Sacred Heart Church, Kilburn; English Martyrs Church, Tower Hill; St Mary's Church, Morecambe; the presbytery of the Sacred Heart Church in Bridgeton, Glasgow, Scotland; and St Mary's Church in Stirling.

The firm designed the high altar of the church of St John Cantius and St Nicholas Catholic Church in Broxburn, West Lothian in caen stone and marble.^[2]

There are reputedly about a hundred buildings by the firm in Australasia, built from the mid-1850s onwards, for the Roman Catholic Church. All but one are in Australia; the singular example in New Zealand is the 1894 Bishop's Palace in Saint Mary's Bay, Auckland, commissioned by Dom John Edmund Luck OSB (1840–1896), the fourth Bishop of Auckland (in office: 1882–1896). John Luck had been a monk of St Augustine's in Ramsgate, Kent, England – that monastery was funded by the Reverend Alfred Luck, John's father, and built by Edward Welby Pugin in 1861, near the Luck family house formerly the home of (and designed by) A. W. Pugin and its neighbour the Pugin-designed St Augustine's Church, Ramsgate. John Luck joined the Benedictine novitiate in 1861; he became Bishop of Auckland in 1882.^[3]

• Pugin & Pugin, Short Biography
• The Churches of EW and PP Pugin