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

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Engel, Ute (2004). "The Formation of Pevsner's art history: Nikolaus Pevsner in Germany 1902–33". In Draper, Peter (ed.). Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner. Ashgate. ISBN 978-0-7546-3582-6. Do you ever get a sense of travelling in Nikolaus Pevsner’s footsteps when researching the new editions?

His first intention was to move to Italy, but after failing to find an academic post there, Pevsner moved to England in 1933, settling in Hampstead, where poet Geoffrey Grigson was his next-door neighbour in Wildwood Terrace. [3] [4] [5] Pevsner's first post was an 18-month research fellowship at the University of Birmingham, found for him by friends in Birmingham and partly funded by the Academic Assistance Council. [6] A study of the role of the designer in the industrial process, the research produced a generally critical account of design standards in Britain which he published as An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (Cambridge University Press, 1937). He was subsequently employed as a buyer of modern textiles, glass and ceramics for the Gordon Russell furniture showrooms in London. Today there are four series of county volumes: England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland – as well as a guide to the Isle of Man. Each county volume comprises a gazetteer describing the buildings of significance, accompanied by maps, plans, and more than 100 specially commissioned photographs; an informative introduction explains the broader context. 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.Charles O’Brien is joint series editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides and author and contributor to several volumes in the series. Charles is a child of Surrey and the second edition was his first introduction to the Pevsner series. He has spent four years writing and researching this volume and describes it as the most significant project in his 25 years of working on the series, because of his personal connections to the area. Carola Kurkbaum (1902-1963), was the older sister of a school friend of Pevsner and they first met in cold winter of January 1917 when they were both 14. Lola, as she was known, was a lively, energetic woman, but not an intellectual, and their marriage had its difficulties. They were married in 192. Pevsner came over to England in 1933 and Lola eventually joined him in 1935 with their three children.

Games, Stephen, "3: Geoffrey Grigson", Pevsner: The BBC Years: Listening to the Visual Arts, Routledge, 2016, p. 17. In London 2; South, published in 1983, The Old Town Hall, which houses the Information and Reference Library is described thus:

References

The old repertoire pretty much sees you through; the occasional times when you have to use something new are technical terms for engineering in recent buildings…but the old glossary of terms still serves pretty much everywhere you go!

Completing the Buildings of Scotland series with a revised Lothian by Jane Geddes & Charles O’Brien First published across four separate volumes: Middlesex, London, except the Cities of London and Westminster, Surrey and Kent: West and the Weald He wrote notes and abbreviations on tiny scraps of paper. These were then transferred onto another sheet of paper – one column was filled with the details of what would be included in the final work, the right column was left free for additional info and corrections. After a day looking at buildings Pevsner would work on his notes in the evening while his companion planned the route for the following day and put together the relevant information. The revision and updating of his original guides was always Pevsner’s expectation and some limited correction had already begun before the last of the county guides was written. Several of the earliest books were revised in the 1970s by Bridget Cherry and Elizabeth Williamson and from 1978 the first of the guides for Ireland, Scotland and Wales were published. The scope of the work became more ambitious after 1982 when London 2: South became the first of the larger format volumes to be published. Since then, initially under Penguin Books and from 2002 under Yale University Press, the revisions have been undertaken by a large family of independent authors, supervised by the in-house editor-writers, Simon Bradley and Charles O’Brien. In this period we have achieved publication of all of the volumes for Scotland and Wales and by Spring 2024, with the publication of Staffordshire, we will have completed the project to produce new, fully-revised and expanded volumes for the whole of England to replace Pevsner’s original forty-six guides. The project for Ireland continues, you can read more about it here.In 1946, Pevsner made the first of several broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme, presenting nine talks in all up to 1950, examining painters and European art eras. By 1977 he had presented 78 talks for the BBC, including the Reith Lectures in 1955 – a series of six broadcasts, entitled The Englishness of English Art, [15] for which he explored the qualities of art which he regarded as particularly English, and what they said about the English national character. [16] His A. W. Mellon lectures in Fine Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., were published in 1976 as A History of Building Types. [17] 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. Once all the volumes of The Buildings of England were completed work then began on The Buildings of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It was Pevsner’s energy and single-mindedness which enabled this Herculean task to be completed. His aim was to encourage people to look at the buildings around them, and to be able to put those buildings within a national tradition and within a European context and above all he wanted people to enjoy their local built environment. He was knighted in 1969 for services to art and architecture and he died on 18 August 1983 at his Hampstead home (2 Wildwood Terrace) where he had lived since 1936. He was buried, alongside Lola, at St Peter’s Church, Clyffe Pypard, Wiltshire where the Pevsner family cottage was. A very well-attended memorial service was held in December at the University Church of Christ the King, WC1. Even today, nearly 25 years after his death, the various Buildings series are still referred to as “Pevsner’s” and he is listed as being the founding editor . Pevsner’s guides have played a huge role in the appreciation of architectural history, as companions to the tourist, and as a vital tool to architects, conservation officers and researchers. These talks celebrate Pevsner’s influence, achievement, and legacy, and give an opportunity to discover new corners of the UK and Ireland. 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.