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

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Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner CBE FBA (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England (1951–74). Online Winter Talk Series: Four Nations and an Island: The Pevsner Architectural Guides in the 21st Century Cornwall was researched and written by the art and architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, who also served as author and co-author of the later volumes. Its purpose echoed that of other guides from the interwar and mid-century periods. H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927) was a popular example. Its success inspired many to produce similar works aimed at discerning tourists or ramblers. Pevsner’s main competitor was the Shell Guide to the Countryside, as published between 1934 and 1984. These took a county-by-county approach but were lighter in depth and detail than Pevsner’s exhaustive works. The series continued under Pevsner's founding editorship into Scotland. The format is largely similar; however, only Lothian was published in the original small volume style. One noticeable difference in some of the Scottish series is a greater subdivision of the main gazetteer ( e.g. in Argyll and Bute mainland Argyll has separate gazetteer from its islands, and Bute similarly is treated on its own). Unlike The Buildings of England, none of the Scottish volumes adopts a hierarchy of ecclesiastical buildings, instead grouping them together. As with the English revisions, several of the volumes are the work of many contributors. The series was completed with Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire, published in November 2016. A new edition of Lothian is in preparation, set to be published in 2024. [3] During this period he became interested in establishing the supremacy of German modernist architecture after becoming aware of Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exhibition of 1925. In 1928, he contributed the volume on Italian baroque painting to the Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft, a multi-volume series providing an overview of the history of European art. He taught at the University of Göttingen between 1929 and 1933, offering a specialist course on English art and architecture. According to biographers Stephen Games and Susie Harries, Pevsner welcomed many of the economic and cultural policies of the early Hitler regime. However, due to Nazi race laws he was forced to resign his lectureship at Göttingen in 1933.

Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh: Honorary Graduates". hw.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 18 April 2016 . Retrieved 7 April 2016. First published across four separate volumes: Middlesex, London, except the Cities of London and Westminster, Surrey and Kent: West and the Weald 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. Prepare to be Outraged". The Sunday Times. 28 March 2010. Archived from the original on 22 March 2016 . Retrieved 14 May 2014– via hughpearman.com. Review of Pevsner – the Early Life, by Stephen Games

Nikolaus Pevsner was born in Leipzig, Saxony, the son of Anna and her husband Hugo Pevsner, a Russian-Jewish fur merchant. He attended St. Thomas School, Leipzig, and went on to study at several universities, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt am Main, before being awarded a doctorate by Leipzig in 1924 for a thesis on the Baroque architecture of Leipzig. [1] In 1923, he married Carola ("Lola") Kurlbaum, the daughter of distinguished Leipzig lawyer Alfred Kurlbaum. [2] He worked as an assistant keeper at the Dresden Gallery between 1924 and 1928. He converted from Judaism to Lutheranism early in his life. 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. Pioneers of Modern Design (originally published as Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936; 2nd edition, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949; revised and partly rewritten, Penguin Books, 1960) Work on the series began in 1945. Lane employed two part-time assistants, both German refugee art historians, who prepared notes for Pevsner from published sources. Pevsner spent the academic holidays touring the country to make personal observations and to carry out local research, before writing up the finished volumes. The first volume was published in 1951. Completing the Buildings of Scotland series with a revised Lothian by Jane Geddes & Charles O’Brien

The Isle of Man is not part of either England, Scotland, Ireland or Wales, but has been influenced by all of them. It started Queen Victoria’s reign as a haven for genteel half pay officers; it ended it as a holiday resort for Lancashire millworkers and a centre of zinc mining. In between it welcomed works by architects as diverse as J L Pearson, M H Baillie Scott, Basil Champneys and Frank Matcham. This talk, by the author of the new Pevsner for the Island, gives an overview of its Victorian buildings, from churches and chapels to boarding houses and country seats. Highlights include an early factory village, the world’s largest waterwheel and an introduction to a number of local architects. Dr Jonathan Kewley is of Manx descent and has known the Island all his life. He read history at Oxford and now works for Historic England as an architectural historian. He is the author of the new Buildings of the Isle of Man in the Pevsner series. Framing all this was his career as a writer and editor. After moving to England, Pevsner had found that the study of architectural history had little status in academic circles, and the amount of information available, especially to travellers wanting to inform themselves about the architecture of a particular district, was limited. Invited by Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, for whom he had written his Outline and also edited the King Penguin series, [12] to suggest ideas for future publications, he proposed a series of comprehensive county guides to rectify this shortcoming. The Pevsner Architectural Guides are a series of guide books to the architecture of Great Britain and Ireland. Begun in the 1940s by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the 46 volumes of the original Buildings of England series were published between 1951 and 1974. The series was then extended to Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the late 1970s. Most of the English volumes have had subsequent revised and expanded editions, chiefly by other authors. Wildwood Terrace". The Daily Telegraph. London. 25 January 2013. Archived from the original on 30 January 2013. A sweeping introduction to the buildings of Victorian Cork, exploring how essentially provincial architects responded to emerging architectural themes while revelling in the opportunities offered by its varied local building materials. Frank Keohane is an architectural historian and chartered building surveyor specialising in the conservation of historic buildings. A native of Cork, he is the author of The Buildings of Ireland Cork volume, published by Yale University Press in 2020 and Irish Period Houses: A Conservation Guidance Manual, published in 2016.

References

In 1995 a CD-ROM entitled A Compendium of Pevsner's Buildings of England was issued by Oxford University Press, designed as a searchable database of the volumes published for England only. A second edition was released in 2005. Bibliographies of the guides themselves were published in 1983, 1998 and 2012 by the Penguin Collectors Society. Robert Scourfield talks about the Victorian and Edwardian buildings of Powys, for which he was the revising author of Richard Haslam's original Buildings of Wales volume of 1979. Prior to that, Rob was the co-author of the two south-west Welsh volumes - his home territory as a native Pembrokeshire man. Rob is the Buildings Conservation Officer for the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. 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. The existing guides of England, (for example, Arthur Mee'sKings England series) mainly concentrated on the picturesque landscape, supported by historical anecdotes and biographical details. There were two scholarly surveys of architecture but these were chunky volumes, really only suitable to libraries, and were still incomplete with the completion time estimated in the hundreds of years. I guess that shows the usefulness of this series then? In that these buildings are not being overlooked and that hopefully people will then visit them.