One of the greatest cultural projects ever undertaken in Britain reaches a climax next Thursday in the undeserved obscurity of Paisley’s museum and art gallery. In the town’s finest neoclassical building (“its elegant elevational reserve and exquisite detail justly compared to … the precedent of Karl Friedrich Schinkel”), a modest party will celebrate the publication of the volume in the Buildings of Scotland series devoted to Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire. There can be no more fitting place to do it: Paisley is Renfrewshire’s biggest town, and the home to some of Scotland’s finest architecture.
But with the book’s launch something far grander will have been completed. It means that every significant building in every corner of England, Scotland and Wales will have descriptive entries in the series better known as the Pevsner Architectural Guides. This, the 68th volume, plugs the last gap.
No other country in the world has anything quite like Pevsner – nothing as wide in its scope, as particular in its details or as firm and (sometimes) capricious in its judgments. A cult attaches itself to Nikolaus Pevsner and his books, and it can seem precious: you imagine modern Pevsnerites doing the rounds of shuttered Woolworths stores, like Victorian tourists trailing through Florence, Baedekers in hand. Never mind. No other single person or project has done more to make people in Britain understand and appreciate their manmade surroundings by teaching us to see them.
His biographer, Susie Harries, wrote that the “objective nearest to his heart was to develop in people an appetite for looking”. The fulfilment of this ambition had the important side-effect of saving many fine buildings from obliteration during the urban clearances and anti-Victorian purges of the 1950s and 60s – but it also gave a lot of pleasure in itself: the pleasure of discovery.
To travel through a familiar and apparently undistinguished piece of country with a Pevsner as your guide is to see it as fresh and remarkable, as if a sheet of gauze had been pulled back. The quote about Paisley museum, for example; though not by Pevsner, who died more than 30 years ago, it’s nevertheless written in his connective spirit. By naming Schinkel, it links Paisley to Berlin, where the Prussian architect completed the much larger (but similarly Greek revival) Altes Museum a few decades earlier. And suddenly poor old Paisley can be seen in a new light, as a town that in the 19th century had joined the confident European mainstream, carried there by the thread factories that made it essential to the new global trade in textiles.
Pevsner was part of another current. Born in Leipzig to a family of Russian-Jewish fur traders, he converted to Lutheranism, and studied at no fewer than four German universities before Nazi race laws deprived him of his job as a lecturer in art history. According to Harries, he arrived in England “speaking four languages and reading six”. He was one of those refugees – another example is the screenwriter and film producer Emeric Pressburger – whose admiration for his adopted country helped to define it. What could be more “English”, after all, than Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, or Pevsner’s desire to describe every country church worth recording?
It sounds like a life’s work, but in fact Pevsner also taught and campaigned, and wrote and edited many other books aside from the architectural guides, and in any case didn’t get going on the guides until he was in his 40s. The idea came out of the egalitarian and hopeful spirit of wartime Britain, when it seemed that no limit could be set on the intellectual curiosity of “ordinary” people. The founding publisher of Penguin paperbacks, Allen Lane, had both promoted and profited from that spirit – in 1946, the Penguin Homer outsold Agatha Christie – and it was Lane who asked Pevsner what kind of books he would publish, given a free hand.
Regional and county guidebooks to Britain had grown massively in popularity since the advent of the bicycle and, more importantly, the car, but they tended towards the quaint, the atmospheric and the fact-free. Remembering a German series, Handbuch der Deutschen Kunstdenkmäler (Guide to German Cultural Monuments) that had begun to appear 40 years before, Pevsner proposed that England deserved something as comprehensive and thorough. In 1945 Lane gave him a salary and an office, and Pevsner hired a secretary and two refugee German art historians as his part-time assistants. The first three volumes didn’t appear until 1951, but from then on they were published at an average of around two a year until the last of them, number 46, Staffordshire, came out in 1974.
They needed tremendous, exhausting diligence. First an assistant would spend a year researching a county’s buildings, collecting and compiling information, and then Pevsner, his wife driving, would tour the county for four or five weeks in his little car, seeing things for himself and making lengthy notes.
“I should now fill the rest of this page with nice human bits, but it’s no good,” Pevsner wrote one night from his hotel. “The journeys are just not human. To bed 11.0, 11.30, too tired even to read the paper. Up this morning at 6 to scribble, scribble, scribble.” Not everywhere welcomed his curiosity; he sometimes got on poorly with the owners of country houses. “Nice staircase of c1753,” was his only comment on the interior of Combe Florey, Auberon Waugh’s house in Somerset. “One can’t very well take offence at that,” Waugh countered later, “but I feel my staircase has been violated whenever I reflect that his bleary socialist eyes have appraised it.”
Extending the series to Scotland at first didn’t interest him. He felt there was “not much” in its 33 counties. But by the 60s he began to think differently; redevelopers were tearing down fine buildings in Edinburgh’s Princes Street, and slum clearance and new road projects threatened the Victorian heritage of Glasgow.
In 1969, a Scottish series got under way under the leadership of the architectural historian Colin McWilliam. The first book appeared nine years later, followed soon after by the first of separate series on Wales and Ireland. There may never be an end to the work. The Yale University Press, which replaced Penguin as the publisher, accommodates the series’ editorial staff of four in its London office. The original English volumes need serious revision – buildings have come and gone since Pevsner passed through, often too quickly – while the Irish series, which isn’t confined to the north, has still to be completed.
The Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire volume is by Rob Close, Frank Arneil Walker and the late John Gifford. I have it in front of me now: 850 pages, 123 colour plates, numerous monochrome illustrations, maps and plans. The range of buildings that attract our interest has widened since Pevsner began. He paid very little attention to factories, for example, or art deco cinemas – the first because they were such a frequent part of the landscape, the second because he found them cheap and distasteful. The art deco Hoover works in west London, now treasured, was for him “perhaps the most offensive of the modernistic atrocities along this road of typical bypass factories”.
All that has changed – Renfrewshire’s equivalent of the Hoover works, the India tyre factory at Inchinnan, even gets a colour plate – but other aspects endure. The usual and very necessary architectural glossary; the usual fine essay on the area’s geology – important to an understanding of a building’s stone. You realise that urban Scotland contains a stupendous number of churches and that once it was Christian. You realise that you knew this part of Britain much, much less well than you thought, and vow to see the marvellous interior of the Coltness Memorial Church (by William Wallace, 1877-78), near where the ironworks used to be, somewhere near Wishaw. A trip is called for.
