where Greek buildings and smoking chimneys, Radicals and Dissenters are blended together". However Birmingham's ferment of religious diversity also placed it at the heart of the mid-19th-century English Catholic Revival, and after his conversion to Catholicism in 1834 Pugin quickly became associated with Birmingham's Oscott College, where he was to live from 1837 as college architect and Professor of Ecclesiastical Art and Architecture. During this period he built a series of buildings in Birmingham that marked the turning point in the use of Gothic as a functional, honest expression of the form and function of building. The first of these, completed in 1838, was the chapel of Oscott College itself – alongside Scarisbrick Hall one of the two major works of Pugin's first years as an architect. This was Pugin's first large-scale work of ecclesiastical gothic, and the freedom he had at Oscott gave him his first opportunity to achieve his vision of a complete, integrated medievalist world, with his Gothic design work extending from the building's architecture to its furnishings and metalwork and even the vestments of its clergy. In 1840 he designed St Mary's Convent, Handsworth, a small and unobtrusive building that is nonetheless exceptional for its date in its explicit medievalism. The major work of this period, and one of the most important buildings of Pugin's career, was St Chad's Cathedral, the first new cathedral to be built in England since London's St Paul's, and the first Roman Catholic cathedral to be built in England since the reformation. Opposite St Chads stood the Bishop's House (demolished). Austere and tightly composed, with ornamentation limited to decorative brickwork and a small number of stone dressings, this was the most influential building Pugin ever designed. Its simple unpretentious style based on the honest use of traditional materials marked the birth of the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement, and its exceptional originality and adventurousness marked the birth of the idea of rational construction that was to dominate the architecture of the 20th century. J. A. Chatwin became one of the most prolific architects involved in the construction or alteration of churches in Birmingham. Some of his most significant works include the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Birmingham, which was completed in 1873, Aston Parish Church in 1879, and St Martin in the Bull Ring in 1873. As well as designing churches, he designed the King Edward VI High School for