PEVSNER ARCHITECTURAL GUIDES

Simon Bradley

Most book-loving oldies will have at least one volume of ‘Pevsner’ at home. The name is shorthand for the founder of the Buildings of England guidebook series, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–83). Arriving in England as a refugee from Hitler in the 1930s, Pevsner subsequently made no small mark on national life — shelfloads of books, masses of other writings on art and architecture, professorships at Cambridge and London, cofounder of the Victorian Society, regular BBC broadcasts — but the eponymous guides are his greatest single legacy. At least half a million have been sold since Penguin published the debut volume, Cornwall, in 1951.

‘Pevsner’ is, however, a flexible term. Fearing that he wouldn’t cover all the English counties in his own lifetime, Pevsner recruited younger writers as authors or co-authorsors for twelve of the original 46 volumes. When the first printingsngs sold out, other writers took on the job of revising and updating them.

Pevsner’s last volume as sole author was Staffordshire (1974), in which he looked forward to a full complement of these new editions. ‘The publisher is ready for them, an excellent reviser is busy. The more of these revised editions I shall still see the happier I shall be.’

The ‘excellent reviser’ was Bridget Cherry, joined shortly afterwards at Penguin by Elizabeth Williamson. Other hands had already been identified by Pevsner to produce founding volumes of series on Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The first book in an expanded format, Bridget Cherry’s London 2: South, was published in September 1983, a few weeks after Pevsner’s death. Another 26 new or revised volumes appeared under the Penguin imprint up to 2002, when the undertaking moved to Yale University Press. Since then there have been fifty more. These new arrivals include colour photographs, with several all-colour paperback guides to English cities.

November brings the 51st Yale volume, Aberdeenshire: South and Aberdeen, by Joseph Sharples, David W Walker and Matthew Woodworth (as it happens, an Englishman, a Scotsman and an American; Pevsner, with his international scholarly connections, would surely have been pleased). That will leave just one instalment pending north of the Border, covering the counties of Lanark and Renfrew. Wales is now fully surveyed, in seven largeformat volumes. Ireland has further to go: four books so far published, another two close to completion, leaving about half the country still to do.

As for England, revised large-format books now cover several entire regions, including London, East Anglia and the North-west. Authors are busy filling the gaps among the other counties, with the target of 2020 to complete the work. A book on the Isle of Man is a distinct possibility.

All this means that Pevsner’s own words make up less and less of the series published under his name. A few purists may chafe at this, but Pevsner was no purist. His mission was to open the eyes of the English to their own architecture, not to have the last word.

Meanwhile the well-thumbed old Penguin editions endure on the shelves, but the England they describe can be hard to recognise now, especially its towns and cities. More remote still is the limited research on which the books were based. Local architects and craftsmen, regional styles in architecture, industrial monuments and transport buildings — to choose three themes among many — are covered scantily, if at all. Any errors of fact or description must be identified and set right too. So the revising authors find plenty to keep them busy.

Pevsner’s successors also devote more time to the task. He typically had to cram each county tour into a single month during university vacations, but authors can now expect their fieldwork to extend over three years or more — long enough to arrange entry to locked churches and chapels, and to cajole wary houseowners into allowing a visit. Intimate portraits rather than brilliant outlines, the new editions have something in common with old-fashioned county histories like Hasted’s Kent or Ormerod’s Cheshire. Yet they are still written very much as guidebooks, with a paramount sense of each building as a fresh encounter for the visitor’s eye and understanding.

The next revised English volume on the slipway is Derbyshire, due in June 2016. In Pevsner’s own words, ‘Don’t be deceived, gentle reader, the first editions are only ballons d’essai; it is the second editions which count.’

Simon Bradley’s latest book The Railways: Nation, Network and People is published by Profile at £25; his guide to Cambridgeshire was published last year.