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

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a b c d e f First published in London: The Cities of London and Westminster–see Superseded and unpublished volumes.

In 2016, Yale University Press published three volumes, each serving as an introduction to some of the buildings and the architectural terms mentioned in the text of the guides. Published as Pevsner Architectural Guides: Introductions these are: an architectural glossary (also available as an app), a volume focusing on church buildings and another on dwelling houses (including vernacular architecture). Time was tight and Pevsner refused any hospitality that was offered and turned down any social engagements and other distractions. He concentrated intensely and single-mindedly on the task in hand and worked very hard. Pevsner said that after 6 hours his legs got rather wobbly! He once upset the chatelaine of a house in Somerset as he arrived at 3.30, stayed for 20 minutes, and didn’t stay for the tea she had asked her staff to provide. Neil Stratford, one of his drivers, said that he didn’t make appointments with building owners but just turned up saying ‘I’m sorry to disturb you but I’m interested in old buildings round here – may I look at the outside of your house’. They were normally so intrigued that they invited him in and, if they didn’t, he asked to see the staircase. Churches were usually open so didn’t pose any problems. First published across four separate volumes: Middlesex, London, except the Cities of London and Westminster, Surrey and Kent: West and the Weald In addition, two volumes, North Devon and South Devon (1952) were superseded by a single volume covering the entire county. Parts of the original Hampshire & the Isle of Wight and Yorkshire: the West Riding volumes have been superseded by revised volumes.Pioneers of Modern Design (originally published as Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936; 2nd edition, New York: Museum of Modern Art,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) Foolscap was an imperial paper size which was used before the introduction of international paper sizes. It was replaced by A4 paper. In London 2; South, published in 1983, The Old Town Hall, which houses the Information and Reference Library is described thus: 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. Since Pevsner's death, work has continued on the series, with several volumes now in their third revision, and three in their fourth editions.

After updating and correcting London 1: the Cities of London and Westminster for its reissue in 1962, Pevsner delegated the revision and expansion of further volumes to others, beginning with Enid Radcliffe for Essex (1965). [14] The gazetteer descriptions of revised volumes do not routinely distinguish between Pevsner's original text and any new writing, but more recent books sometimes supply his words in quotation when the revising author's judgement differs, where a building has since been altered, or where the old text is no longer topical. 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.Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Peterborough in the Pevsner Buildings of England series is now available from Yale. The Buildings series and the Pelican History of Art series were taken over from Penguin by Yale University Press in the 1990s and new editions continue to be published. In 2001 the first in the series of Pevsner Architectural Guides on Manchester was published and volumes on other cities, such as Bath, Bristol and Sheffield, followed. More recently, in 2016, the first Pevsner Introductions which cover different types of buildings appeared, on housesand churches. The latest (2017) volume of The Buildings of England to be published was Oxfordshire North and West. 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 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. a b First published in two separate volumes: Middlesex and London, except the Cities of London and Westminster–see Superseded and unpublished volumes.

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.

References

Online Winter Talk Series: Four Nations and an Island: The Pevsner Architectural Guides in the 21st Century 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. 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. 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. From the 1960s onwards more information was available to be consulted and new research began to make the emphases of the early volumes appear a little unbalanced. Although from the beginning the books had broken new ground by covering all periods of architecture, the greatest space had been devoted to medieval churches and their furnishings. Secular buildings, with some notable exceptions, had been treated more summarily. Revisions, before and since Pevsner’s death, have continued to take advantage of developments in architectural scholarship. The scope of the series has been broadened and deepened by the transformation of our understanding of the post-medieval centuries, the research into architecture and urban planning of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the wealth of interest in both rural vernacular buildings and the surviving structures of Britain’s industrial past.In the 1970s and 1980s a younger generation began to show a greater interest in cinemas and Art Deco factories and over time that interest extended to an appreciation of the best of postwar architecture, from schools to council estates and from private houses to office buildings. The results are more inclusive, but the aim remains the same: to present to a broad public up-to-date and accessible information about the most significant buildings in the country whilst always keeping under review the definition of ‘significant’.

All the volumes in the series have dedications which are often humourous in tone. For example, one volume was dedicated “to those publicans and hoteliers of England who provide me with a table in my bedroom to scribble on”.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 revision of Surrey for the first time since 1971 has also provided the opportunity to update and expand the oldest remaining descriptions in the whole of the series. They belong to the gazetteer entries for the Thamesside towns and villages that historically belonged to Middlesex and which Nikolaus Pevsner included his original volume for that county in 1951. They have been in Surrey since the 1965 redrawing of boundaries that absorbed most of the historic county into the new boroughs of outer West London. Work on the Buildings of England series began in 1945, and the first volume was published in 1951. Pevsner wrote 32 of the books himself and 10 with collaborators, with a further four of the original series written by others. Since his death, work has continued on the series, which has been extended to cover the rest of the United Kingdom, under the title Pevsner Architectural Guides, now published by Yale University Press. [13] 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.