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

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The seven talks run 24th January – 8th March 2023 but include a recording that can be watched any time. 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 In addition, two volumes, North Devon and South Devon (1952) were superseded by a single volume covering the entire county. Parts of the original Hampshire & the Isle of Wight and Yorkshire: the West Riding volumes have been superseded by revised volumes.

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. In 2007, a blue plaque was erected by English Heritage at the house that had been Pevsner's home since 1936. [24] [21] 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.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. 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)

a b First published as Lancashire 1: The Industrial and Commercial South–see Superseded and unpublished volumes. 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. 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. Foolscap was an imperial paper size which was used before the introduction of international paper sizes. It was replaced by A4 paper.

The series has also been extended to Wales, and was completed with the issue of Gwynedd in 2009 (although this initial survey had taken seven years longer than Pevsner's first complete survey of England). Only the first volume, Powys (edited by Richard Haslam, and published in 1979), appeared in the original small format style; and this volume has now been superseded by a revised large-format edition, published in 2013. This is the first (and to date only) guide outside The Buildings of England series to be revised. 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 ]

Cherry, Bridget (1998). The Buildings of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales: a short history and bibliography. London: Penguin Collectors' Society. ISBN 978-0-952-74011-7. 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. 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] Pevsner, Nikolaus (2010). Aitchison, Mathew (ed.). Visual Planning and the Picturesque. Getty Research Institute. ISBN 978-1-60606-001-8.Games, Stephen; Pevsner, Nikolaus (2002). Pevsner on art and architecture: the radio talks. Methuen. ISBN 9780413712202.