Essex: Buildings of England Series (Buildings of England) (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)

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And Huntingdonshire and Peterborough; people aren’t really sure what that means, because they were abolished as counties in the 70s. Again, other than people who live there it’s not somewhere people are particularly familiar with. Which is a shame really because there is a distinct architectural identity. But in terms of interesting facts … it’s interesting in that there is quite a lot more than you imagine. I felt, when I was there, that I was constantly seeing things that I just hadn’t expected, particularly with the quality of the buildings. Research notes by Pevsner (and other editors) for the Buildings of England series are held in the Historic England Archive in Swindon. [26] Publications [ edit ] Laughs] Interesting facts? Well it’s an odd area: Bedfordshire is a tiny county, it’s known well by people who live there, but because of where it is, its sort of just outside the home counties ring around London but it’s not sufficiently far into the Midlands to feel disconnected from London. It’s more a place that people travel through. If you go up the M1 you’ve gone through Bedfordshire before you’ve kind of blinked really. So, I think the point I make in the introduction to the book is that it is terra incognita for most people. I hardly met anyone who would say ‘Oh Bedfordshire, yes I know…’. Most people have never been there and yet it’s only an hour from London. A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal." From An Outline of European Architecture, 1943.

The tours, initially made in a 1933 Wolseley Hornet borrowed from Penguin, began in 1947 with Middlesex. The first book, on Cornwall, appeared in 1951, the forty-sixth, and last, on Staffordshire, in 1974. A first draft was written immediately after each long day’s visit, a feat of prodigious energy (hence the dedication of one of the volumes “to those publicans and hoteliers of England who provide me with a table in my bedroom to scribble on”.) As soon as the travelling was finished, Pevsner shut himself away for a week to write the Introduction while everything was still fresh in his mind. These lively essays on the development of architecture in each county, written by a scholar up to date with the latest art-historical scholarship, were another feature which set the series on quite a different level from previous guidebooks. Games, Stephen, "3: Geoffrey Grigson", Pevsner: The BBC Years: Listening to the Visual Arts, Routledge, 2016, p. 17.Bridget Cherry; Simon Bradley, eds. (2001). The Buildings of England: A Celebration. London: Penguin Collectors' Society. ISBN 978-0-952-74013-1. The seven talks run 24th January – 8th March 2023 but include a recording that can be watched any time. That does mean occasionally, you stumble on things and realise that people haven’t really looked at them before and they’re in surprisingly good condition, things like shops in towns, which have been routinely destroyed, or a pub interior, where it’s remarkable that it has made it through really. Occasionally it means that putting it in here [taps book] will hopefully mean that someone thinks its worth putting forward for listing, or even just at a local level that they should look after it better. Grigson, Geoffrey, Recollections, Mainly of Writers and Artists (Hogarth Press, 1984), quoted in Harries 2011, p. 273.

Papers relating to the work of the Victorian Society during his years as chairman are held by the Victorian Society themselves and the London Metropolitan Archives. ( Victorian Society archives) The Irish series is incomplete, with six volumes being published between 1979 and 2020. Research for some of the remaining five volumes is underway. In 1942, Pevsner finally secured two regular positions. From 1936 onwards he had been a frequent contributor to the Architectural Review and from 1943 to 1945 he stood in as its acting editor while the regular editor J. M. Richards was on active service. Under the AR 's influence, Pevsner's approach to modern architecture became more complex and more moderate. [10] Early signs of a lifelong interest in Victorian architecture, also influenced by the Architectural Review, appeared in a series written under the pseudonym of "Peter F. R. Donner": Pevsner's "Treasure Hunts" guided readers down selected London streets, pointing out architectural treasures of the 19th century. He was also closely involved with the Review 's proprietor, H. de C. Hastings, in evolving the magazine's theories on picturesque planning. [11]Partly, as with all the counties, it’s about what Pevsner gave attention to, one has to look at the guides again and there’s always more to add. It’s also the stuff that he simply didn’t look at, both in terms of buildings since the 1960s and for 18th or 19th-century buildings that he simply wasn’t aware of or passed by. The same goes for medieval houses, which in the 1960s people were in the first stages of understanding, as a lot of the detailed survey work which has now been done on cottages and small manor houses was then just getting going. So those are the things that typically have expanded the new entries. A landlady in a million? Snapshots of days gone by" (PDF). Birmingham University online newspaper. No.57. 2005. p.10. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 March 2009. Also here I was dealing with buildings that are predominantly medieval churches, so quite different from the sort of things I’d previously been doing. But of course I’ve contributed to various other volumes principally authored by others, so it wasn’t a totally new experience. The boundaries of each volume do not follow a uniform pattern and have evolved with revisions and expansions. The original intention was to maintain whatever boundaries were current at the time of writing; in the first years of the survey these were the traditional counties of England. [2] However, boundary changes to the London area in 1965 and the rest of England in 1974 meant that this was no longer practicable. As such there are now many variants: Cumbria, for example, covers the modern non-metropolitan county–excepting the district of Sedbergh which although in modern Cumbria is included in the volume covering the West Riding of Yorkshire. Conversely, the Furness area–geographically in Cumbria but traditionally in Lancashire–is included, having been omitted from the predecessor volume, Cumberland and Westmorland. Pevsner wrote thirty-two of the books himself and ten with collaborators, with a further four of the original series written by others: the two Gloucestershire volumes by David Verey, and the two volumes on Kent by John Newman. Newman is the only author in the series to have written a volume and revised it three times.

Published in 1951, Cornwall was the first of The Buildings of England series. It would eventually cover the whole country and reach a total of 46 volumes, standing as a classic and widely-acclaimed interpretation of the the architectural and cultural history of the counties. The series drew to a close in 1974, a year marked by local government reform and by the revision of county boundaries. The books reflected the pre-1974 ceremonial or administrative divisions. Pevsner was also contracted, as the same time as the Buildings series, to edit and commission a series of handbooks on the history of art and architecture for Pelican. This was to become The Pelican History of Art series. The first volume was Painting in Britain, 1530 to 1790 by Ellis Waterhouse, published in 1953. The series is still going today and is now published by Yale University Press.

As well as The Buildings of England, Pevsner proposed the Pelican History of Art series (which began in 1953), a multi-volume survey on the model of the German Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft (English: "Handbook of the Science of Art"), which he would himself edit. Many individual volumes are regarded as classics. First published in two separate volumes: London, except the Cities of London and Westminster and Essex Buildings of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (BOE01) Archive Collection | Historic England". historicengland.org.uk . Retrieved 30 June 2022.