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

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Framing all this was his career as a writer and editor. After moving to England, Pevsner had found that the study of architectural history had little status in academic circles, and the amount of information available, especially to travellers wanting to inform themselves about the architecture of a particular district, was limited. Invited by Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, for whom he had written his Outline and also edited the King Penguin series, [12] to suggest ideas for future publications, he proposed a series of comprehensive county guides to rectify this shortcoming. Where revisions have been spread over more than one volume, the preceding edition remains in print until the whole area has been revised. Games, Stephen; Pevsner, Nikolaus (2002). Pevsner on art and architecture: the radio talks. Methuen. ISBN 9780413712202. Nikolaus Pevsner was born in Leipzig, Saxony, the son of Anna and her husband Hugo Pevsner, a Russian-Jewish fur merchant. He attended St. Thomas School, Leipzig, and went on to study at several universities, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt am Main, before being awarded a doctorate by Leipzig in 1924 for a thesis on the Baroque architecture of Leipzig. [1] In 1923, he married Carola ("Lola") Kurlbaum, the daughter of distinguished Leipzig lawyer Alfred Kurlbaum. [2] He worked as an assistant keeper at the Dresden Gallery between 1924 and 1928. He converted from Judaism to Lutheranism early in his life.

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. The volumes on Glasgow and Edinburgh are, with Dublin (see below) the only Pevsner volumes outside London to focus exclusively on a city. These volumes should not be confused with the City Guide format (see above). Bridget Cherry; Simon Bradley, eds. (2001). The Buildings of England: A Celebration. London: Penguin Collectors' Society. ISBN 978-0-952-74013-1.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.

Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh: Honorary Graduates". hw.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 18 April 2016 . Retrieved 7 April 2016. The Buildings of England series was finally completed in June 1974 with the publication ofOxfordshireandStaffordshire. Pevsner was rewarded for his dedication to architecture with a knighthood thirteen years before his death in 1983. The series is still going strong today, some thirty years since it was finished, with regular revisions and amendments being made and three revised books expected to be published in 2007. In addition to the Buildings of England series there are also three companion series:Buildings of Wales,Buildings of Scotlandand Buildings of Ireland.

A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal." From An Outline of European Architecture, 1943. The Isle of Man is not part of either England, Scotland, Ireland or Wales, but has been influenced by all of them. It started Queen Victoria’s reign as a haven for genteel half pay officers; it ended it as a holiday resort for Lancashire millworkers and a centre of zinc mining. In between it welcomed works by architects as diverse as J L Pearson, M H Baillie Scott, Basil Champneys and Frank Matcham. This talk, by the author of the new Pevsner for the Island, gives an overview of its Victorian buildings, from churches and chapels to boarding houses and country seats. Highlights include an early factory village, the world’s largest waterwheel and an introduction to a number of local architects. Dr Jonathan Kewley is of Manx descent and has known the Island all his life. He read history at Oxford and now works for Historic England as an architectural historian. He is the author of the new Buildings of the Isle of Man in the Pevsner series. Pevsner also described in his An Outline of European Architecture the three ways aesthetic appeal could manifest itself in architecture: in a building's façade, the material volumes, or the interior. T. F. T. Baker, Diane K. Bolton and Patricia E. C. Croot, "Hampstead: North End, Littleworth, and Spaniard's End", in C. R. Elrington (ed.), A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 9, Hampstead, Paddington, ed. (London, 1989), pp. 66–71. British History Online. Retrieved 29 November 2018.

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”. 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 also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1975. [19] Death and legacy [ edit ] 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) The talks are introduced by Pevsner series Editors Simon Bradley and Charles O’Brien who have masterminded a 10-year project of updating the much-loved old Pevsner volumes and creating new ones for Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. The Victorian Society has an exceptionally strong link with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner - one of the Society’s 32 founders that also included poet Sir John Betjeman.

References

Partly, as with all the counties, it’s about what Pevsner gave attention to, one has to look at the guides again and there’s always more to add. It’s also the stuff that he simply didn’t look at, both in terms of buildings since the 1960s and for 18th or 19th-century buildings that he simply wasn’t aware of or passed by. The same goes for medieval houses, which in the 1960s people were in the first stages of understanding, as a lot of the detailed survey work which has now been done on cottages and small manor houses was then just getting going. So those are the things that typically have expanded the new entries. Generally speaking the villages have changed less, so it’s more about giving a better, fuller account of the same buildings. I think the biggest thing, particularly in counties that have these major road corridors, is that the villages have doubled in size since Pevsner’s day in terms of population, with a lot of very unremarkable housing erected around their historic core. In 1984, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles acquired the Nikolaus Pevsner Papers, [25] an archive that includes 143 boxes of typed and handwritten notes, clippings, photographs, books, lecture notes, and manuscripts.