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Pevsner’s Great Project

The forty-six volumes in Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series were originally intended as guides you could slip into your pocket. I don’t think I’ve ever actually carried one around in that fashion, not even the early, comparatively slender ones, and to do so with any of the more recent revised editions would require a poacher’s jacket and very sturdy shoulders. Nevertheless, they are for me the ultimate handbooks: enjoyable to handle, with flexible hard covers suggesting resilience; enticing to behold, with their restrained design redolent of serious purpose; and utterly engrossing in the mass of information within.

If you’re not fairly keen on buildings, you might struggle to share this view. I gather that even some who count architecture amongst their interests find Pevsner a little dry. I can see what they mean – but is this really a criticism? Being a little dry, it seems to me, is an essential characteristic of the series; being a little dry is its job. If it weren’t dry, it might be quite enjoyable, it might even veer towards being utterly delightful, like the Shell Guides – but then it most definitely wouldn’t be Pevsner. And we really couldn’t do without him.

Imagine driving past an intriguing pair of gates, glimpsing a fine building through the trees, being unable to stop to investigate – and then arriving home and having no means of looking up the place. Or imagine planning a journey and not having Pevsner to hand to check what might be worth looking at en route. How many times has one passed a house or a church, quite close to home, realized how little one knows about it and reached for Pevsner on one’s return to provide the necessary information?

If your bookshelves are full of the early editions – the first three were published in 1951 – it has to be said that disappointment is a possibility. What they made up for in portability, they sometimes lacked in content. Pevsner was fa

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The forty-six volumes in Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series were originally intended as guides you could slip into your pocket. I don’t think I’ve ever actually carried one around in that fashion, not even the early, comparatively slender ones, and to do so with any of the more recent revised editions would require a poacher’s jacket and very sturdy shoulders. Nevertheless, they are for me the ultimate handbooks: enjoyable to handle, with flexible hard covers suggesting resilience; enticing to behold, with their restrained design redolent of serious purpose; and utterly engrossing in the mass of information within.

If you’re not fairly keen on buildings, you might struggle to share this view. I gather that even some who count architecture amongst their interests find Pevsner a little dry. I can see what they mean – but is this really a criticism? Being a little dry, it seems to me, is an essential characteristic of the series; being a little dry is its job. If it weren’t dry, it might be quite enjoyable, it might even veer towards being utterly delightful, like the Shell Guides – but then it most definitely wouldn’t be Pevsner. And we really couldn’t do without him. Imagine driving past an intriguing pair of gates, glimpsing a fine building through the trees, being unable to stop to investigate – and then arriving home and having no means of looking up the place. Or imagine planning a journey and not having Pevsner to hand to check what might be worth looking at en route. How many times has one passed a house or a church, quite close to home, realized how little one knows about it and reached for Pevsner on one’s return to provide the necessary information? If your bookshelves are full of the early editions – the first three were published in 1951 – it has to be said that disappointment is a possibility. What they made up for in portability, they sometimes lacked in content. Pevsner was famously fulsome in his descriptions of parish churches but he was not as attentive as later collaborators to vernacular architecture. That balance – or lack of it – may be what puts some readers off. I can understand that their attention might wander from a lengthy discussion of the knobs on seventeenth-century church pews, or the types of arches in the gatehouse of a Premonstratensian abbey. But there’s always something else to read a few lines further on. A German Jewish academic who moved to England after losing his post at Göttingen University in 1933, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (as he later became) brought scholarly rigour and an extraordinary appetite for sustained research to his great project, at a time when architectural history was still largely the preserve of a few enthusiastic amateurs. Without the auspicious day that brought him into contact with Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, we might still be waiting for a comprehensive guide to The Buildings of England. It is difficult to imagine the circumstances under which any publisher today would contemplate such a massive undertaking, despite the far greater number of professional architectural historians around and the more widespread popularity of the subject. The project, first proposed by Pevsner towards the end of the Second World War, envisaged a series of county guides that would cover as many buildings of significance as could be crammed between the covers of each volume. Buildings of significance, in Pevsner’s terms, meant ‘churches prior to c.1830 and all town houses, manor houses, and country houses of more than purely local interest’. Of the rest (including churches and chapels built since 1830) he wrote that he ‘had to make a selection, and this is dictated by architectural value or by significance otherwise in the light of architectural history. The same applies to secular buildings of the C19 and C20.’ This approach, reinforced by the sources on which he relied, explains the limited space devoted to secular and Victorian architecture in the original books, which is ironic, for he later became chairman of the Victorian Society. When I first began to use Pevsner’s handbooks, I harboured a romantic image of the historian as sleuth, combing each of England’s counties in search of obscure edifices and architectural curiosities, checking the map to ensure he had missed no minor lane or hidden building. On that basis, we would certainly still be waiting for the series to be written. It would have been utterly impracticable to originate the research and write all the books in a single lifetime. Instead, and rather more prosaically, Pevsner – who already had one job as a lecturer at Birkbeck College – employed two German refugee art historians to search through existing records for details of buildings which he would then visit during exhausting county tours. Borrowing a 1933 Wolseley Hornet from Lane and relying on his wife, Lola, as chauffeur since he did not drive, Pevsner viewed buildings all day and wrote notes either late at night or early in the morning (as well as letters to Lane complaining of the Hornet’s shortcomings). Always in the Foreword to his guides he noted: ‘I have myself seen everything that I describe’; adding meticulously that ‘information obtained by other means’ was placed in brackets. Using the Pevsner guides requires a degree of concentration. Those who pick up a volume expecting to be introduced conversationally to an area or building may well be disappointed by the staccato style, the many abbreviations and the apparent lack of interest in beguiling the reader. Opening the original (1966) Yorkshire North Riding volume at random, for example, one comes across this somewhat underwhelming description of the grounds of a country house:
Five terraces step down from the front to the lake. To the E the temple, an ambitious Gothick folly. It is quite broad and quite high and has a raised centre and angle turrets. The ground floor is arcaded. There are besides pointed windows, and also the typical quatrefoils of the Early Gothic Revival.
That wouldn’t get past a sales-conscious editor today. Graceless passages of this sort encourage critics to compare Pevsner unfavourably with John Betjeman and John Piper’s Shell Guides, thirteen of which had already appeared by 1939. Here, for example, is Betjeman describing the village of Ladock in Cornwall (albeit in the second, 1964, edition of the Cornwall guide):
Travelling south to Truro this parish with its wooded valley of the Tresillian river is the first inkling of the tropic richness of South Cornwall. There are cottages and a Methodist chapel off the main road and hidden in elms and beeches and rhododendrons up a steep bank a late Georgian rectory and behind it a pretty village school by J. P. St Aubyn. St Ladoc’s church is large and stately.
Betjeman undoubtedly brings the atmosphere and sounds of a bosky West Country village directly to the reader and makes one want to visit Ladock immediately. Pevsner, by contrast, leaves the reader’s imagination with a clear field. But at least his austere approach doesn’t risk painting too pretty a picture. I don’t know the Yorkshire house that Pevsner describes; but the main road in Ladock that Betjeman mentions was a busy route into Truro at the time and a blight on the village. Contrasts like these may temporarily weaken the resolve of a few Pevsner users; but in reality they simply serve to demonstrate why The Buildings of England is uniquely valuable. Your eyes may turn glassy at yet another church entry studded with Perps and Decs and S and N; you may well remain unmoved by the dull and inadequate ‘plates’ that represent so few of the buildings mentioned in the text; you may long for the wonderfully atmospheric, grainy photographs by John Piper that litter the pages of the idiosyncratic Shell Guides. But when you want a scholarly, authoritative inventory of buildings, there is no alternative to Pevsner. And now that many of the original volumes are being revised and expanded, the old caveat about missing buildings no longer applies. On a recent visit to Bristol, my 12-year-old son and I tried out one of the new Pevsner paperback city guides (consisting of Pevsner’s descriptions of cities extracted from their original volumes, updated and augmented by modern contributors). Our time there was brief and my knowledge of the place based on distant impressions as an undergraduate, so I found myself struggling to answer most of my son’s questions about Brunel’s suspension bridge. Out came Pevsner, where the relevant entry might have been written with the two of us in mind: all the essential data for him (height from high-water mark to deck, width of span, dates, costs, etc) along with the historical context, quotations and details of Brunel’s plans. To remind myself of the history of Clifton, where I lived for three years, I found the chapter on the outer areas, where eight descriptive ‘walks’ give plentiful details of domestic architecture, interspersed with those of churches, schools and public buildings. The organization of the walks may not always seem logical (though perhaps it’s unfair to judge on the basis of Clifton, since the place is so haphazardly arranged) but maps and the highlighting in bold of the name of each building or street make information easy to find in the text. There are also plenty of cross-references. Written by Andrew Foyle, this modern ‘Pevsner’ follows the same basic plan as the originals, starting with a good introduction that provides, in the space of about forty pages, a summary of the geography, geology, building materials and history of Bristol’s development. This is followed by sections on major public buildings (of which the bridge is counted as one), city churches, the city centre, the inner city, outer areas and excursions. The layout is mercifully clear and simple, as of old, though a few ‘topic boxes’ have been introduced and discreetly scattered throughout the book. As usual, there are two indexes: one of artists, architects ‘and other persons mentioned’, and the other of localities, streets and buildings. The illustrations are better and more numerous than in the early Pevsners, and the text more informal and readable: though Andrew Foyle is quick to acknowledge that Pevsner’s words in the original North Somerset and Bristol volume of The Buildings of England (1958) often ‘remain the best expression of Bristol’s architectural wealth’. As Bridget Cherry, a former editor of the series and contributor to the Bristol volume, pointed out in her introduction to the revised edition of Devon in 1989, Pevsner himself helped to develop the understanding of architectural history that has led to the updating of his original work – and its extension to cover Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In 1952, when the Devon volumes (North and South) first appeared, he wrote that ‘the present state of research does not really justify a guide book such as this’. The 1989 edition, by contrast, contains nearly 1,000 pages of information on all things architectural in the county, from prehistoric remains to 1970s housing developments. It’s certainly no longer a pocket book, but it’s a joy to hold and for me an essential companion.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 17 © Annabel Walker 2008


About the contributor

Annabel Walker is a lifelong buildings enthusiast.

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