An English market town rebuilt by the rules of the Gothic Revival: orientated churches whose spires make the skyline, a Ruskinian town hall with its clock tower over the market cross, a parish school and parsonage by the churchyard, almshouses round a court, and streets of steep-roofed brick houses.
In the second edition of Contrasts (1841) Pugin drew the same English town twice: in 1440, a walled place of spires and towers, every parish with its church and every guild with its hall; and in 1840, its spires broken, its skyline taken over by a gasworks, a jail and a workhouse. The plate is a planning argument as well as a religious one: a town should be ordered by its churches and public buildings, and its charity should take the form of almshouses round a chapel, not of a prison for the poor.
This parish is the Victorian answer: a town of the 1860s built to the rules of the revival. Its churches follow the Cambridge Camden Society’s Few Words to Church Builders (orientated east, with a distinct lower chancel, a west tower and spire, steep roofs); its school, parsonage and villas follow Pugin’s True Principles, with plans that dictate the gables and chimneys rather than a symmetry imposed from outside; its town hall follows Ruskin, with walls banded in brick and real stone and a tower that answers the spire across the market place.
The layout is deliberately unplanned in the Georgian sense: a High Street climbing from the bridge to a market place, lanes and roads following the ground, buildings set where their use puts them. Click a building to see its rule.