DAVID MATLESS
(University of Nottingham)
Pevsner and the Landscapes of Englishness
The Buildings of England series can be understood, in terms of their origins in the 1940s-50s, as part of a particular consensus on the nature of Englishness which emerged in the period of post-war reconstruction. Essentially optimistic and democratic, it sought a reconciliation or harmonious balance between planning and preservation, tradition and modernity, and the country and the city. Pevsner himself was involved in the Council for Visual Education, which aimed to promote 'a more beautiful and better planned environment for the everyday life of the people', in which the ordinary citizen would be equipped and stimulated to 'delighted looking'. The stripped-down but vivid and diverse language of the Buildings of England books - something commented on by the writer Colin MacInnes towards the end of the 1950s as distinctively new - can be traced to a concern with a 'language of economy' that was appropriate for just this kind of visual education, and their even geographical coverage also had democratic and inclusive connotations.
The distinctiveness of the series can also be brought out by comparison with other writings of the time, of which those by the historian W.G. Hoskins are particularly instructive. Hoskins' reflections tended towards the elegiac and the defensive, in which the past existed primarily as a place of solace and retirement, and in which the individual identity of the English counties was subject to erosion and homogenization. For Pevsner, the past was a different kind of place (in time, and, through the built environment, in space too). Its monuments could be linked to an evolving process of design in which England is but one part of an international culture - 'Western thought, our thought' - and in which the art of the past has lessons for the present when viewed formally, as an exercise in design.
The specific instance of the Leaves of Southwell - to which Pevsner devoted a King Penguin volume as well as some of the most vivid writing in the early Buildings volumes - also sheds light on the question of art in its relation to the greater world, in that the engagement of their sculptors with the visual facts of nature had lessons for the way in which modern eyes might be opened to the world around them. Southwell therefore emerges as an exemplar of how Pevsner wished readers to use the series: 'visiting Southwell means visiting design, visiting nature, visiting Nottinghamshire, visiting Europe.'
(summary by Simon Bradley)
