'Englishness, of course, is the purpose of my journey'. Nikolaus Pevsner and the origins of the Buildings of England.
Susie Harries
This talk, a brief 'pre-history' of the Buildings of England, began by answering the question 'Why England?' Pevsner's first visit to England was as a child, to the home of his maternal grandfather in West Hampstead. Far more influential was a study trip he made in 1930, to gather material for a course of lectures on English art and architecture, which he was to give at the University of Göttingen, He had already made inspection grups to look at buildings while still a student, relying on the Dehio guides to the principal German monuments; but it was on this 1930 visit that he first began to develop the methodology that would see him through the colossal task of cataloguing the buildings of England. He encountered many of the practical difficulties that would dog him throughout the twenty-five years of travelling for the series - acute time pressure, unhelpful vergers, loquacious home-owners - and started to evolve the method of working which would enable him to counter or short-circuit the problems - careful note-taking during the day, review and reflection on the road, analysis and synthesis in hotel bedrooms in the evenings.
But as this point he came nowhere near attaining his original objective - of getting to the roots of the national character as displayed in its art and architecture. 'Englishness of course is the purpose of my trip.' he had written as he set off. Five years later, when he had left Germany and come to England to look for a permanent job, he still felt an outsider: 'Every sentence, every lecture, every book, every conversation here means something quite different from what it would mean at home. The words mean something different. The brain itself is would differently.' He was far from committed to his new home: 'England remains alien to me and, despite all my admiration for its qualities, somehow hateful/' But economic and political necessities kept him in place, learning the language and the tricks of behaviour that would enable him to blend, locating England in his grid of intellectual references, producing articles and books on facets of English art, design and architecture.
He first submitted a proposal for a 'Buildings of England' project around 1936, but the war nipped this venture in the bud. Indications of the format he had in mind are to be seen in the 'Treasure Hunt' articles that he wrote under a pseudonym for the Architectural Review in 1942. These articles are proto-types of the 'Perambulations' that hewould incorporate in the Buildings of England entries for larger towns and cities - walks on which he points out details of buildings and explains their historic, social and aesthetic significance. The philosophy of the Buildings of England is taking shape. The 'Treasure Hunt' articles were meant to be 'neither propaganda nor a sermon'; their aim was simply to increase the sum total of human enjoyment: '99 out of 100 people nowadays do not look at buildings at all unless by special effort… Those who care to embark on expeditions of their own will find that looking at houses can be entertainment as well as an object lesson, a family game (Date your District) as well as a treasure hunt.' So by the time he was asked by Allen Lane around 1947 to propose Penguin writing projects for himself, he had a fair idea of what the Buildings of England might look like, how he might set about it, what it might cost him - and, perhaps, what it might be worth.
Susie Harries' biography of Nikolaus Pevsner will be published by Chatto and Windus in 2002, the centenary of his birth.
