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

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Foolscap was an imperial paper size which was used before the introduction of international paper sizes. It was replaced by A4 paper. Pevsner began work on the series in the autumn of 1945 and he would have embarked on his first trip the following year, probably around Middlesex (the county he lived closest to, as he lived in Hampstead).

Nikolaus Pevsner, an art historian of European standing, conceived the idea of English architectural guidebooks after he settled in England in the 1930s. At that time architectural history was hardly recognised as a serious academic subject, nor was trustworthy architectural information readily available for the traveller. The success and achievement of his aim eventually became possible with the assistance and enthusiasm of Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, for whom Pevsner had written his Outline of European Architecture in 1942. Lane provided Pevsner with the means to begin research for the books in 1945 with the help of two part time research assistants, both German refugee art historians, and a secretary. For the next twenty five years a pattern was established whereby an assistant worked for around a year on each county, preparing notes from published sources. During the Easter and Summer university vacations, then armed with fat folders of half-foolscap sheets, Pevsner set off to visit two counties, driven by his wife and, after her death in 1963, by others, usually students at London University or the Courtauld Institute of Art.Bridget Cherry; Simon Bradley, eds. (2001). The Buildings of England: A Celebration. London: Penguin Collectors' Society. ISBN 978-0-952-74013-1. First published across four separate volumes: Middlesex, London, except the Cities of London and Westminster, Surrey and Kent: West and the Weald Do you ever get a sense of travelling in Nikolaus Pevsner’s footsteps when researching the new editions?

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. 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 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.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. 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. 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. A number of bridges connect areas covered by different volumes. However, there is no single approach for which volume should include the structure in its main gazetteer. In some cases, one volume refers the reader to the other, and in other cases only a few lines appear in one volume and a fuller entry appears in the other. In a very few cases (listed below) a full entry appears in both volumes. This is the first one I’ve done completely solo, I’ve been co-author to other volumes, but the last one I’ve had to really do a lot of visiting and writing for was East London, so the issues were completely different there. You’re talking about an intensively urban environment and only on its absolute fringes are you getting any sense of rural settlement, whereas this was predominantly rural, aside from quite big towns like Luton and Peterborough. Most of it was small villages, even with the overdevelopment of dormitory-type housing in those sorts of places. So it is different; most of East London I could do on foot from tube stations but here you are absolutely reliant on your car for getting about.

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). 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’. Pevsner was unable to devote much more than a month to visiting each county and the speed at which the books were prepared inevitably led to errors and omissions. Each volume invited readers to send in comments and publication, and was immediately followed by a shower of letters eagerly drawing attention to anything from minor misprints to the relatively rare absence of whole villages or substantial houses. As the work became more demanding and time-consuming it became essential for Pevsner to share the writing with others. In the end, thirty-two of the books were written by Pevsner alone, ten together with collaborators, and four were delegated to others, all of whom made their own valuable contribution to the series. Work started in 1946, with the initial stage undertaken by two part-time research assistants. They worked for months at a time in the libraries amassing a huge file of notes on every place of interest. Then during the Easter and Summer breaks, as this was the only time Pevsner could afford to take out from his other commitments, he would travel around the countryside in a car driven by his wife Karola. They would drive from dawn until dusk with Pevsner scribbling on a clipboard, then that same evening Pevsner would write the first draft. This hectic schedule led to the following quotes and dedications in his books, which sum up just what a task it was:In 1986, Penguin published an anthology from Pevsner's volumes edited by Bridget Cherry and John Newman, The Best Buildings of England, ISBN 0-670-81283-8. It has an introduction by Newman assessing Pevsner's aims and methods. In 2001, the Penguin Collectors Society published The Buildings of England: a Celebration, edited by Simon Bradley and Bridget Cherry, fifty years after BE1 was published: it includes twelve essays and a selection of text from the series. [8] In 2012, Susie Harries, one of Pevsner's biographers, wrote The Buildings of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales: A Sixtieth Anniversary Catalogue of the Pevsner Architectural Guides, which was published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies by the Penguin Collectors Society. [9] Travels with Pevsner [ edit ]