Pevsnering by Will Self

i cannot have been alone in this: as the pandemic took hold last year and the country went into lockdown, I found the city I live in, London, transformed and by no means entirely for the worse. With far less traffic in the streets, I began noticing the buildings a great deal more, seeing them with eyes no longer compelled to follow the trajectory of this van or that car, lest it fatally intersect with my own. I’ve been a flaneur for decades now — if, by this, is understood a wanderer who takes his pleasure from the very random nature of urbanity itself: the chance encounters big cities afford both between people, and between them and places. But what I realised as a result of the crisis was that there were whole swathes of this — the city of my birth — that I had taken for granted for decades.

Just like any ignorant tourist, I’d filled in the gaps with a sort of render, as if I were a computer games designer: here are 19th-century terraces, there 1950s and ’60s Brutalist council estates, while way over there, somnolent crescents and cul-de-sacs are lined with privet hedges behind which skulk inter-war Tudorbethan semis. But I’d long since stopped looking at these things intently; they were simply the concrete and clay backdrop I strutted and fretted in front of.

Worse still — like any tourist, who views London as some sort of giant souvenir tea towel, decorated with tit-helmeted coppers and quaint red phone booths — if I did pay any attention to the built environment it was to the most salient buildings: the ones either famous — St Paul’s, Tate Modern — or notorious, such as the bizarre, Aztec-inspired ziggurat of an office block designed by Terry Farrell (and his associates) that houses MI6.

I’m not going to pretend that I was unaware of Nikolaus Pevsner or his extraordinary The Buildings of England guides before the pandemic (I’ve written on architecture, planning and related matters for years), but I confess I’d never actually bought one, let alone consulted it on a regular basis. That’s all changed now, indeed, I’ve become an enthusiastic Pevsnerer, if you’ll forgive a coinage as ugly as… well, as ugly as the aforementioned MI6 Building, of which the man himself writes… Well, he writes nothing, because he died in 1983 while Babylon-on-Thames — as some wit dubbed it — wasn’t completed until 11 years later. The London 2: South volume of Pevsner’s The Buildings of England that I have was published in the year of his death, and was extensively revised and added to by the architectural historian, Bridget Cherry.

You might imagine this would render the guides otiose, but far from it. The truth is that much that appears solid in our contemporary built environment is about to melt into the smoggy air: many of the megastructures that dominate our cities are built with at best 75-year specifications, meaning every structurally significant component will have to be replaced by then, or the building demolished. This means the vast amount of what has remained will remain, so it’s worth confining oneself when Pevsnering to the stuff that’s already made the cut. Although there’s also an interesting alternative form of Pevsnering that involves reading about what’s gone and trying to visualise it.

As to the revisions: the guides were never compiled solely by Pevsner himself — he had assistants to check out all the significant buildings in the given county (the guides, with the exception of London, are demarked by county boundaries) before he began touring it; while along with Cherry there are several other significant collaborators — some of whom have continued in bricky-harness since the mâitre’s death.

Nevertheless, of the 46 original volumes in his guides series, Pevsner wrote a full 32 of them alone; moreover, there’s no distinction in the guides between his words and those of his collaborators. There’s something about the monumentality of the task that speaks through the myriad pages of these chunky volumes. Other countries may have comparable sets of architectural guides, but none of them has the coherence and solidity of being born of a single individual and his singular vision. Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian fabulist, wrote a fragment entitled “On Exactitude in Science”, in which he imagined a country in which a dedicated guild of cartographers laboured to produce a map that was the same size as the territory it describes, and such can seem the comprehensiveness of The Buildings of England.

I look one way down the road I live in and see “the most extreme example of attempts to make the tower form visually exciting in a Brutalist manner”. Pevsner further limns this 22-storey point-block as a “distinctive jagged landmark”; while to me it looks like an old-style filing cabinet with all the drawers open. But then that’s what his and his collaborators’ pithy descriptions do: provoke the Pevsnerer to come up with their own. For by contrast, if I look out my bedroom window I see a broad dome that’s distinctively “Byzantine Romanesque, like Bentley’s Westminster Cathedral”. Pevsner goes on to rhapsodise Christ Church, Brixton Road (completed in 1902), thus: “Cruciform, with a broad crossing with dome on pedentives, lunettes above”. My youngest son is a little less technical. Passing the church the other day, he remarked, “Have you ever noticed how it looks like a cock and balls?”

My eldest brother, professor emeritus of architectural history at Vassar University in upstate New York, tends to be a little dismissive of Pevsner, describing his approach as “formalist”: defining a building by a particular style — English Perpendicular, neo-Gothic, et cetera — and then simply analysing how far it conforms or departs from it. But I just think old bro’s envious; after all it has to be the highest possible achievement in an architectural writer’s life to become synonymous with the built environment you describe. And besides, there are so many delightful little touches in Pevsner’s prose (or possibly Bridget Cherry’s); take this sideswipe at another of my local churches: “The church of 1874–’77 by GG Scott Jun, was, alas, demolished after it had been completely ruined in the war, and replaced by a building of no significance.”

Ouch! That hurts me, although probably not as much as it likely did the poor architect, one Ralph Covell. Hurts me, because I happen to love St Agnes, Kennington Park, which is a strange sort of red brick, “soft modernist” take on the neo-Gothic: a house of God that really does look like someone’s, um, house.

Anyway, I could go on… and on…. Each of Pevsner’s guides contains extensive glossaries of the relevant terms (and face it, you’ve always wondered what “sharawaggi” means), and overviews of the history of any given area’s buildings. Reading a single volume feels like a labour more or less equal to building the buildings it describes, and this sense of the inexhaustible is then conferred on them, such that the Pevsnerer no longer sees an undifferentiated mass of “city stuff”, but is returned once more to a child-like wonder at their extraordinary variety.

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