Pevsner Architectural Guides

Origin and research methods

After moving to the United Kingdom from his native Germany as a refugee in the 1930s, Nikolaus Pevsner found that the study of architectural history had little status in academic circles, and that the amount of information available, especially to travellers wanting to inform themselves about the architecture of a particular district, was limited. He had previously written An Outline of European Architecture for the Pelican imprint of Penguin Books. When he was invited to suggest ideas for future publications by Penguin founder Allen Lane, he proposed two: the Pelican History of Art, and a series of comprehensive architectural guides to the English counties which became The Buildings of England.

Work on The Buildings of England began in 1945. Lane employed two part-time assistants, both German refugee art historians, who prepared notes for Pevsner from published sources. Sources used included the inventories of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, the Survey of London, and the Victoria County History. Pevsner, who held positions at Birkbeck College, University of London and the University of Cambridge, 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 of the original forty-six volumes, Cornwall, was published in 1951, and the last, Staffordshire, in 1974.

Pevsner wrote thirty-two volumes himself and ten with collaborators. A further four of the original series were written by other authors: the two Gloucestershire volumes by David Verey, and the two volumes on Kent by John Newman. The first volume of The Buildings of Scotland was published in 1978, and the first volumes in The Buildings of Wales and The Buildings of Ireland in 1979. Revisions to the original English series began in 1962, and continued after Pevsner's death in 1983. Several volumes are now in their third or fourth revisions, and the final unrevised first edition, Staffordshire, was superseded by an updated edition in 2024.

''The Buildings of England''

The books are compact and intended to meet the needs of both specialists and the general reader. Each contains an extensive introduction to the architectural history and styles of the area, followed by a town-by-townand in the case of larger settlements, street-by-streetaccount of individual buildings. These are often grouped under the heading "Perambulation", as Pevsner intended the books to be used as the reader was walking about the area. The guides offer both detailed coverage of the most notable buildings and notes on lesser-known and vernacular buildings; all building types are covered but there is a particular emphasis on churches and public buildings. Each volume has a central section with several dozen pages of photographs, originally in black and white, though colour illustrations have featured in revised volumes published by Yale University Press since 2003.

Boundaries

The volumes originally used the boundaries of the historic counties of England, which were current at the time of writing. They largely continue to use the historic boundaries, but have been partially updated to reflect changes in London, Birmingham and the Black Country, and Cumbria. The volume on the historic county of Middlesex, for example, has been superseded by three of the six volumes covering the Greater London area, whereas Tyne and Wear, which was established from parts of County Durham and Northumberland in 1974, is covered in the volumes about those two counties.

Volumes in print and their editions

Since 1962, the guides have undergone a gradual programme of updating to reflect architectural-history scholarship and to include significant new buildings. Pevsner left virtually all the revisions to others, acting as supervisor only. He ultimately revised only two of his original editions alone: London 1: The Cities of London and Westminster (1962) and Cambridgeshire (1970). Both were later revised again by others. The programme of revision of first editions was completed in 2024 with publication of the second edition of Staffordshire, replacing that published in 1974.

Until 1953, all volumes were published in paperback only, after which both hardback and paperback versions were issued. The revision of London: 1 in 1962 was the first volume to be issued in hardback alone, and no further paperbacks were issued after 1964. Until 1970 volumes bore a sequential BE reference number, with Cornwall being BE1. The last volume to be so numbered was Gloucestershire 2: The Vale and the Forest of Dean (BE41). Thereafter ISBNs identify each volume. Beginning in 1983, a larger format was introduced, and all subsequent new editions have been issued in this format (while, pending revisions, pre-1983 volumes continued to be reprinted in the original, smaller format). All editions are now published by Yale University Press.

The list below is of the volumes that are currently in print; for superseded volumes, see below. Where revisions were spread over more than one volume, the preceding edition remained in print until the whole area had been revised.

''City Guides''

The first of the paperback City Guides, covering Manchester, appeared in 2001. It featured a new format with integrated colour illustrations. In most cases the City Guides have preceded a revision of the volume on the county in which they are located, although they go into greater detail than the county volumes and have more illustrations. The Bristol guide, for example, superseded part of North Somerset and Bristol, which at that point was fifty years old, and provided material for Somerset: North and Bristol, published three years later. Two of the guides, one covering Hull and the other Newcastle and Gateshead, remain the most recent volumes on their areas of coverage, as the corresponding county volume has not been revised since their publication. This series appears to be on a hiatus, with no new volumes published since 2010 and none confirmed as in planning.

Two supplementary worksthus far the only of their typewere published in 1998, one covering London's City Churches and the other the Docklands area (see London Docklands in Superseded and unpublished volumes below). Both were issued in the format of the main series rather than the City Guides. However, unlike the Docklands edition which represented preliminary work for an expanded main volume, the City Churches volume augmented the text in London 1: The City, published the previous year. The continued development of the Docklands area meant that the volume was superseded when London 5: East was published seven years later, but the City Churches volume remains current and was reissued by Yale in 2002.

• London: The City Churches (1998) (Simon Bradley)

''Buildings of Scotland''

Nikolaus Pevsner was enthusiastic about establishing a Scottish series, having responded warmly to an unrealised 1959 suggestion by the architectural historian Andor Gomme that the latter could produce it. The first volume in the series, Lothian, except Edinburgh, was written by Colin McWilliam and published in 1978. John Gifford was a major contributor, authoring five volumes and overseeing research on all but one of the remainder before his death in 2013. After Lothian, which was the only volume published in the original small format, a major task was producing Edinburgh (1984) and Glasgow (1990), which were ambitious in their scope of coverage of urban buildings. The remainder of Scotland was covered in the following decades, with the final volume, Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire, published in 2016. A revision of Lothian was published in 2024, the first full revision of a Scottish volume.

The series is organised using a mixture of Scotland's current council areas (e.g. Highland and Islands) and its historic shires (e.g. Fife and Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire). Some of the Scottish volumes are internally subdivided; for example*,* Argyll and Bute has separate gazetteers for mainland Argyll, its islands, and Bute. Unlike The Buildings of England, none of the Scottish volumes adopt a hierarchy of ecclesiastical buildings, instead grouping them together.

''Buildings of Wales''

The series has also been extended to Wales, and was completed with the issue of Gwynedd in 2009. Only the first volume, Powys (1979), appeared in the original small format style; this volume has now been superseded by a revised large-format edition, published in 2013. The volumes of the series are organised using a combination of the current principal areas (e.g. Pembrokeshire), the preserved counties (e.g. Gwynedd), and the historic counties (e.g. Glamorgan).

''Buildings of Ireland''

The Irish series is incomplete, with six volumes being published between 1979 and 2020. Research is underway on some of the remaining five volumes: Belfast, Antrim, and County Down; Connacht/Connaught; Dublin: County; Munster, except Cork; and South Leinster. The series generally uses the traditional provinces and counties of Ireland as its boundaries and ignores the Irish border.

''Buildings of the Isle of Man''

A standalone volume covering the island, authored by Jonathan Kewley, was published in early 2023.

• Isle of Man (2023) (Jonathan Kewley)

Treatment of bridges

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.

Superseded and unpublished volumes

The revision of the series has rendered some original volumes obsolete, usually as the area of coverage has changed. For example, the county of Cumbria was created after the publication of Cumberland and Westmorland and North Lancashire, leading to the merger of material from both volumes in a single-volume Cumbria, a revision with a new geographical focus. The following volumes have been wholly or partially superseded:

In some published volumes and in advance publicity, certain titles were announced which were ultimately never published. A number of factors accounted for this, including the readiness of parts of the text covering certain areas and the anticipated size of the volumes. Unpublished titles included:

• Argyll, Bute and Stirling
• Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire
• Dublin: City and County
• London III
• South Strathclyde

Related works

In 1995 Penguin, in conjunction with English Heritage, released a publication based on the guides entitled Looking at Buildings. Focusing on the East Riding of Yorkshire volume, Pevsner's text was adapted as an introduction, with a greater number of illustrations than the main guides. No further print publications were issued, but the title survives as an introductory website to architectural terms and selected buildings which feature in the Pevsner guides.

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 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).

Celebratory volumes

In 1986, Penguin published an anthology from Pevsner's volumes edited by Bridget Cherry and John Newman, The Best Buildings of England, . 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. 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.

''Travels with Pevsner''

In 1997, the BBC broadcast a series of documentaries entitled Travels with Pevsner, in which six writers and broadcasters travelled through a county which had particular significance to them. They revisited buildings mentioned by Pevsner, critically examining his views on them. A further series was broadcast in 1998. John Grundy, who presented the programme on Northumberland, was one of the revisers of that county volume. Both series were accompanied by booklets published by the BBC, describing the buildings featured in the programmes and suggesting others to explore. The counties visited and the travellers were:

Series One

• Norfolk (Dan Cruikshank)
• North Yorkshire (Janet Street-Porter)
• Dorset (Patrick Wright)
• County Durham (Lucinda Lambton)
• Warwickshire (Germaine Greer)
• Surrey (Michael Bracewell)

Series Two

• Derbyshire (Joan Bakewell)
• Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (Philip Hoare)
• Worcestershire (Jonathan Meades)
• Suffolk (Craig Brown)
• Northumberland (John Grundy)
• Bristol and Somerset (Philippa Gregory)

In both series, extracts from Pevsner's text were read by Benjamin Whitrow.

Notes

References

Sources

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References

1. O'Brien, Charles. (4 February 2025). "'Is it in Pevsner?': A Short History of the 'Buildings of …' Series - Charles O'Brien". Gresham College.
2. "Pevsner-Series and history". [[Yale University Press]].
3. O'Brien, Charles. (20 Oct 2016). "A Brief History of Pevsner's Buildings of Scotland series".
4. "Lothian".
5. "Pevsner Architectural Guides". Yale University Press.
6. "Looking at Buildings". Pevsner Architectural Guides.
7. "BBC Two - Travels with Pevsner".