'The style of our time': Pevsner, the Buildings of England and 20th century architecture
Bridget Cherry
The inclusion of architecture of all periods in The Buildings of England reflects the breadth of Pevsner's interests and was a novelty among guidebooks of the 1950s. Pevsner's knowledge of the development of British C20 architecture was demonstrated already in the late 1930s in a series of essays which he prepared for a special issue of the Architectural Review, which remained unpublished because of the war, but which he drew on in his later work. They show that by this time he was already familiar with and not unsympathetic to, a wide range of early C20 buildings in traditional historicist styles. However, applying the art-historical principle which held that one style replaced another, he considered that once the continental modern movement had shown the potential of a new way of building as 'the style of our time', the older forms were no longer relevant. Yet Pevsner was not an extremist: one of the objects of the unpublished special issue was to make the point that that buildings in a modern style were compatible with existing British traditions, particularly those in the brick-faced version of modernism which developed in the later 1930s. This remained a recurrent theme in his later writing.
The early volumes of The Buildings of England coincided with a lively public interest in new ideas about the role of post-war planning and architecture, and where possible, the chronological sequence of photos in a county volume would end with a building that was progressive in both style and function, such as Gropius and Fry's Impington Village College, Cambridgeshire. But by the 1960s the situation had altered, as the contemporary architectural scene was developing in ways that he found alienating. He did not shrink from including recent architecture but found much of it unsympathetic, as can be seen in his account, in the second edition of Cambridgeshire, of Stirling's History Faculty Library, described as ' anti-architecture' and 'actively ugly'. He remained loyal to the early buildings of the Modern Movement at a time when these were little appreciated, and in 1966 proposed that the most important examples of the 1930s should be protected by Listing. As a member of the government advisory committee on Listed Buildings (he had been coopted in 1959 as an expert on Victorian architecture) he was asked to draw up a list of 50 examples. The final list, slightly amended by the committee, with 48 items, was eventually officially approved in 1970, breaking new ground in the protection of buildings of the recent past. By this time the history of the interwar period was being assessed more objectively, and Pevsner's selective approach did not find universal favour. Alternative styles and building types began to find their advocates, and Listing was expanded to include a wider range of 20th century buildings, from art deco cinemas and factories to the continuation of the neo-Georgian tradition in country houses. The Buildings of England today recognises of the pluralism of 20th century architecture, and takes a broader and more inclusive view than the first editions, while not neglecting the significance of the pioneering modern buildings to which Pevsner drew attention.
