The most influential figure of the most important phase of the Gothic Revival, however, in Birmingham and worldwide, was Augustus Pugin. Pugin first became involved with Birmingham in 1833, designing the Gothic detailing for Charles Barry's rebuilding of King Edward's School (demolished) in New Street. This was the first secular building in Birmingham to demonstrate the emerging, more scholarly use of gothic, being designed in a Tudor style to reflect the school's 16th century foundation. It was also the first work of the partnership between Barry and Pugin that would later design the Palace of Westminster in London, and it established the pattern that Westminster was to follow, with gothic detailing on a fundamentally classical, symmetrical composition. As a centre of industrial manufacture, with a reputation for religious non-conformism and a largely Georgian streetscape, Birmingham was anathema to Pugin's craft-based, high-church, medievalist outlook, and in 1833 he condemned it as "that most detestable of detestable places - Birmingham, 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.