Qualla: St Augustine's Church, Ramsgate

St Augustine's Church, Ramsgate: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tedster007, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the morning of 14 September 1852, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin walked from his front door across the patch of grass that separated his house from his church, stepped inside St Augustine's at Ramsgate, and remarked to a companion how beautiful it was. He went home. A few hours later he was dead, aged forty. He is buried in the chantry chapel he designed, in a vault beneath an effigy carved by his eldest son. The church above him is the only one he ever built with his own money - the only one, he wrote, where "not one of the true principles will be broken." It stands today on the West Cliff of Ramsgate, knapped flint and Caen stone, the National Pugin Centre, with a spire he never finished still missing from the central tower.

Image: Tedster007 | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Augustine's Church, Ramsgate: Why this cliff

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clint Mann, CC BY-SA 2.0. Pugin was rich, famous, and in a hurry. By 1843 he had already designed the interiors of the Palace of Westminster for Charles Barry. He had been received into the Catholic Church and become its most articulate architectural advocate, championing Gothic Revival as the only true C...

Image: Clint Mann | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Augustine's Church, Ramsgate: Building it himself

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clem Rutter, Rochester Kent, CC BY-SA 3.0. Pugin laid the first stone of St Augustine's in 1845. Construction continued until his death in 1852, with his sons completing the cloisters afterwards. The arrangement was unusual: Pugin paid for every part of it from his own income. Most architects work within budgets set by cl...

Image: Clem Rutter, Rochester Kent | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Augustine's Church, Ramsgate: The shrine that came back

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 362Haggis, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1538 King Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell ordered the destruction of St Augustine's shrine at the abbey in Canterbury where his bones had rested for nine centuries. Most of his remains were destroyed. Some relics, given as gifts to Continental churches in earlier centuries, sur...

Image: 362Haggis | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Augustine's Church, Ramsgate: Inside

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit pam fray, CC BY-SA 2.0. Step into the nave - the word comes from the Latin navis, ship, because the church metaphorically carries souls toward Christ - and you find the baptismal font, the stained glass, the heavy stonework, the Lady Chapel with its glass that Pugin exhibited at the Great Exhibition of ...

Image: pam fray | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Augustine's Church, Ramsgate: Whole society in flint

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Baker, CC BY-SA 2.0. Pugin did not think of the church as a single building. He thought of it as the centre of a complete community - the kind, he believed, that medieval England had built and Reformation England had destroyed. So he built a church, and a school, and a presbytery for the priest, and ...

Image: John Baker | CC BY-SA 2.0