This Earth, this realm, this architecture

It was a bright, sunny day in May 1971 as we mounted the bus in the forecourt of the University of East Anglia, where I had recently been appointed a junior lecturer in history. The department was taking faculty and students on a daylong excursion to visit the villages and churches of the surrounding countryside. As I slid into my seat, the senior professor, a formidable historian of Tudor and Stuart England, asked the group, “Have you all got your Pevsners?” A dozen hands shot into the air, each of them clutching a brown paperback entitled “The Buildings of England: Suffolk.” I was embarrassed, speechless and bookless. What on earth was “your Pevsner”?

It got worse, and then better. It got worse because that day I was left farther and farther behind, intellectually speaking. At the beautiful medieval town of Lavenham, our tour bus deposited us beside a stunning flint-walled Perpendicular church; we walked around it, then surged inside. A little later we strolled down the hill to inspect a wonderful array of timber-framed 15th century buildings. And all the time my colleagues were muttering: “That’s a funny chimney on the Old Dairy House, probably a later addition. What does Pevsner say?” Or: “What are Pevsner’s comments on the Corn Market?” And leafing through their copies of the “Suffolk” volume.

Things had gotten better by the time I left the University of East Anglia for Yale, 13 years later. In the intervening period I had become utterly Pevsnerized. I had his various “Buildings of England” in my pocket or in my car wherever I traveled in England, and I had come to realize that I was continually consulting what was probably the greatest work of individual research and scholarship in the 20th century. Arnold Toynbee, Fernand Braudel and the other greats -- stand aside! There’s no comparison.

Who was he? Nikolaus Pevsner was a German Jew and a promising scholar of architectural history when the Nazi takeover permanently changed his place of abode -- fortunately with no effect on his astonishing career. As in so many other cases, Germany’s loss was Britain’s gain. Pevsner had already written impressive works on Modernist architecture, English buildings and Rococo design; if you put all of his writings together, he was probably more productive than the average large history department. He had visited England to do research in the early 1930s. Now, returning as a refugee, he took a job as night watchman of Birkbeck College, at the University of London. Thanks to a small number of Englishmen who recognized his seething talent, he was moved into academe. Perhaps his greatest benefactor was Sir Allen Lane, the legendary founder of Penguin Books, who commissioned Pevsner in 1942 to write “An Outline of European Architecture” and later hired him to edit the renowned “Pelican History of Art” series. The two became lifelong friends.

This coming together of a writer of genius and a benign patron was an example of what Carl Jung termed “synchronicity.” For Pevsner had an idea -- in fact, a complaint -- to put to Lane: There was absolutely no guide to the buildings of England comparable to, say, the German scholar Georg Dehio’s handbook of German monuments. England possessed tens of thousands of historic buildings, and each year some were being demolished. It was time to describe and recognize their full glory, for here was the richest trove of architecture in the world, with perhaps Italy being the only other contender to that title. English architecture needed its historian.

Pevsner began his “Buildings of England” project in the late 1940s. What followed in the next three decades is not only legendary but also close to physically and mentally impossible. He was by now teaching at both the University of London and Cambridge, continuing as an editor at Penguin and in demand as a lecturer and as a member of a multitude of learned boards. He was still writing books on many other subjects. But for several months a year, he set off into the English countryside in a borrowed 1933 Wolseley Hornet, at first with his beloved wife, Lola, later with one or another of his research assistants, to map and describe the noteworthy buildings of every county in England.

Rising at 6 a.m. after a few hours’ sleep, Pevsner and his assistant would set off on a planned tour of, say, Devonshire, with the rear seat of their rickety automobile full of books and notes. Pevsner’s aim was to cover some 15 villages or small towns in a day. As they approached the town church, he would begin a running commentary on its architecture, then on to the monuments, brasses, pulpits and rood screens within, before marching off to inspect and remark upon the local manor house, the 16th century pub, the 18th century folly and so on. Arriving at nightfall at a grubby bed-and-breakfast, Pevsner would write up the notes and add comments, while his frequently exhausted assistant made telephone calls to ensure access to the next day’s list of buildings. This would go on for seven days a week over the several months.

His productivity was phenomenal. In 1951 Penguin published his volumes on the counties of Cornwall, Nottinghamshire and Middlesex (not at all geographically adjacent, it might be noted, and the car was in frequent need of repair). The next year there followed volumes on North Devon, South Devon and “London: Except the Cities of London and Westminster.” In 1953 there came Hertfordshire, Derbyshire and County Durham. Three years, nine volumes. He then slowed down to an average of two per year, but by the mid-’60s it was back to three. As his energies faded, Pevsner was joined in his authorship by other scholars of English architecture, such as John Newman and Ian Nairn. The last few volumes of “The Buildings of England” are written entirely by a collaborator or pupil but always in the Pevsner style; earlier volumes were then expanded, again by his colleagues and friends. In 1976, on receiving an honorary degree at the University of Pennsylvania at America’s bicentennial, he challenged American scholars to produce “The Buildings of the United States,” a challenge that has been undertaken by the Society of Architectural Historians (eight volumes have been published of the 58 planned). He died in 1983 as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, having changed the way an entire nation thought about its buildings, its landscape, its past.

What was the “Pevsner style”? In so many of his entries -- perhaps because he liked to do 15 parishes a day -- it was terse, clipped, abbreviated: A nondescript Wesleyan chapel on the Lancashire moors would be described as “Built 1767. Uninteresting.” It was also very technical, although to his credit he always provided a glossary, which I consulted often in my early years of becoming a Pevsnerite. What, after all, are strainer arches, triple chamfers or intersected ogee curves, all of which figure in his account of Wells Cathedral? But Pevsner’s prose could also be heavenly, lyrical, almost Shakespearean, sometimes a bit Wodehouseian. Here is the early, pre-technical part of his description of Haddon Hall in Derbyshire:

“Haddon Hall is the English castle par excellence, not the forbidding fortress on an unassailable crag, but the large, rambling, safe, grey, lovable house of knights and their ladies, the unreasonable dream-castle of those who think of the Middle Ages as a time of chivalry and valour and noble feelings. None other in England is so complete and convincing. It is set in gentle green surroundings, with woods above and lush fields and the meandering river below. The river in its winding course enhances the charms of the West as well as the South side. The slope up to the house on the West is steep but not high, and grassy not rocky. The towers and turrets and crenellations look exactly as if they were taken out of the background of some [15th century] illuminated manuscript.” And so on.

Mind you, he could also be withering and dismissive. For a foreigner, he added a remarkable number of insulting juxtapositions to the English language. Proud owners of country houses and the rectors of grand churches went into fits when such twinned adjectives as “ornate and irresponsible,” “picturesque and heavy-handed” and “aspiring but otherwise obscure” were applied to their properties. My favorite among his animadversions is “an unmistakable Teulonesque hamfistedness.” Poor S.S. Teulon was the mid-Victorian architect whose designs and restorations of churches were a particular target of Pevsner’s -- his Church of the Holy Trinity in Oare, Pevsner suggests, “may well be considered the ugliest church in Wiltshire” -- although in recent times other scholars have attempted a Teulon rehabilitation. Of the Baptist church in Leicester, built in 1866 by one Thomas Carter, Pevsner observes: “As far as its architecture is concerned, thoroughly horrible. It would take up too much space to describe the discrepant motifs and demonstrate the unfeeling way in which they are assembled.” The town hall in Tiverton is described in the South Devon volume as “atrocious, a mongrel affair with fat short columns and Frenchy slate roofs.” And of the state prison erected in 1874 at Wormwood Scrubs the only remark is “Built by convicts,” leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.

Some of these judgments were challenged and overturned; sometimes a greater appreciation was written into the second edition by one of Pevsner’s successors. The second editions were also an improvement since their authors had far more time and were able to include many more details of vernacular town architecture, as well as of industrial structures and more modern buildings, all of which had played a relatively minor role in Pevsner’s “churches and castles” approach. With these additions, the series really did become a virtually complete analysis of all the buildings of England. But whatever the deficiencies of the original, no one could approach this field again without checking on what Pevsner had written or making some reference to Pevsner. Thus Simon Jenkins, in his beautiful book “England’s Thousand Best Churches” (1999), writes: “Three great ghosts inhabit all English churches -- those of John Betjeman, Alec Clifton-Taylor and Nikolaus Pevsner.” But he is also quick to add: “Over both Betjeman and Clifton-Taylor towers the magisterial Pevsner -- he is indispensable.” The writer and journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse, who accompanied Pevsner in October 1970, when the great man did his last building inspection (the Old Rectory at Sheen, in Staffordshire) and reported on the day to the Guardian, stated flatly, “There is nothing in the world to match ‘The Buildings of England.’ ”

Slowly, however, the enterprise lost steam. The close link with Penguin faded somewhat, especially after Lane’s death and then the passing of Pevsner himself. The costs had been mounting and were reflected in higher prices. Some volumes went out of print. The series was a substantial money loser for the publisher; even as early as the mid-1950s it had been in danger of closing down. But a second set of godfathers -- including the Guinness brewing company and the philanthropic Leverhulme Trust -- came along, for more than architectural historians had recognized Pevsner’s towering achievement. In 1994 the Buildings Books Trust was established to keep the series going and, just as important, to extend it to Wales, Scotland and Ireland. As I write, new and gorgeous volumes are steadily appearing, and I am sitting at home this raw Sunday afternoon wondering whether to turn first to “Gwent/Monmouthshire” (Wales) or “North Leinster” (Ireland) or “Stirling and Central Scotland” for a little browsing.

I’ve left the best news in this 50-year tale until last. Recent changes in competitive trade publishing made the Pevsner series less of a good fit at Penguin than they were in Sir Allen Lane’s time. The entire enterprise has therefore moved to Yale University Press, which in past decades has emerged as the premier publishing house for quality works in British art, architecture and history. The Yale reprints of earlier volumes, and the recent launches, are considerably larger and longer than the Penguin editions, more sumptuous and more thorough. Thus the extraordinary enterprise has reached a safe haven, and when all volumes are complete they will approach 75 in number. I am already looking for new bookshelves for one of the greatest scholarly ventures of our modern age.

*

The Buildings of England: London series; The Pevsner Architectural Guides; Yale University Press

London 1: The City of London; Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner; 704 pp.; $40

London 2: South; Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner; 800 pp.; $40

London 3: North West; Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner; 808 pp.; $40

London 4: North; Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner; 832 pp.; $40

London: Docklands; Nikolaus Pevsner and Elizabeth Williamson; 320 pp.; $9.99 paper

London: The City Churches; Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner; 160 pp.; $15 paper

London 6: Westminster; Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner; 944 pp.; $45