Pevsner: the refugee who opened our eyes to the beauty of Britain

April 7, 2021, 2:01 pm , by newsroom

An historian’s guidebooks explore Britain’s noted buildings, whether humble or proud, remote on a hillside or crowded into a city. Richard Lutz doesn’t go anywhere without them

I am packing things up: I’m moving. Suitcases, plastic packaging, cardboard boxes, racks of clothes, vital documents lie scattered throughout our home of 38 years.There’s exhaustion, unending decisions and sometimes good fortune: last night, for instance, we found a piece of jewellery behind a cabinet that had either been lost for a decade or stolen by pearl-loving aliens.

The bookshelves have been dutifully stripped. But there is one set of books that are the last to go. They’re the Pevsner guides.

Wherever I am in Britain, I have Nikolaus Pevsner’s volumes of the buildings of Britain. Everything of architectural importance in every county is listed. Small, grand, important, trivial. Durham, Northamptonshire, Powys, East Lothian, Essex. They’re analysed, chewed over, minutely described, carefully defined. Anything from a barn to a cathedral is included. Some counties are so abundant they’ve even been split into two books, such as Gloucestershire: The Forest of Dean and also Gloucestershire, The Vale. This pair alone amount to more than 600 pages:

It always pays to go the wrong way….

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner

Today the Pevsners for my area, the Midlands, go to Ivan….someone I know who’ll use them well. And using them well really means one thing only: go into a building or simply walk around its perimeter and enter the past. Inspect a fresco that had been painted with fear or awe 700 years ago. Look up at a column supporting a roof nailed down during the Crusades. Or take a gander of an Anglo Saxon barn created by yeomen before the Norman Invasion. Britain is a theatre and a museum. And Pevsner is our MC and guide, sometimes abrupt, sometimes a mite academic, sometimes dry and funny, always highly informative.

He came to Britain at the outset of WW2, a German immigrant escaping Nazi poison. His dream was to catalogue the rich architecture of Britain. ‘He’s the refugee who opened our eyes to the manmade beauty of Britain.’ wrote one admirer. And Pevsner cheekily wrote of his odyssey: ‘It always pays to go the wrong way.’

He personally completed 32 of the guides himself and then was helped with 14 others to round out England then Scotland, Wales and, in bits, Ireland. If there is a window of stained glass, if there’a a monumental civic building, if there’s an extravagant manor house, if there’s a simple but handsome village hall, it’s described. If there’s an intriguing garden suburb, it’s explored.

I’ve seen some terrific stuff thanks to Sir Nikolaus, who was knighted for his work. Like this below, a beautiful rendition of an Italian renassiance church piercing the sky in the Herefordshire hamlet of Hoarwithy.

Or the little-visited fresco walls in the quiet country church of St Mary’s outside Kempley in Gloucestershire:

I’m sure Ivan willl fall into this world of Pevsner, fall deep enough to bore the pants off any friend or partner who is driving past a tiny county village or neglected industrial town and follows the Pevsner tip that a gem awaits. There is always time for a Norman church or a mysterious barrow tomb lying lumpy and asleep in a field.

Just to round things out, his Herefordshsire book (a county wealthy in architecture) spends alot of justifiable time on Kilpeck’s Church of St Mary and St David with its Viking-influenced stonework. From a vicious serpent….

to a happy puppy and bunny…

to an overexuberant door arch….

Over in Oxfordshire, this remote 15c church sits next to a hill farm near Shorthampton:

Inside is a treat: the fading remains of majestic frescoes gracing All Saints church. The paintings used to fill the walls. But 17thc religious fanaticism destroyed most of them. Mere fragments remain. They’re ghosts of the past. Here’s one. It’s of the little known St Zita:

Thankfully, my new hometown has plenty to discover, to peek at, to dawdle over. I’ll buy the relevant Pevsner guides. I wouldn’t leave home without one. Hopefully, neither will Ivan.