An indispensable guide

It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series.

It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. The small, southern county was chosen for the prosaic reason that it didn’t need much rationed fuel for research.

His achievement still looks unlikely to be matched: 46 volumes in 23 years, most of them involving 2,000-mile road trips. It isn’t just Pevsner’s architectural scholarship that impresses in this meticulously researched biography, but his physical stamina, at a time when roadside hospitality was at its bleakest. Penguin paid for petrol, but contributed little towards food and accommodation. Camembert sandwiches, bought in London, lasted a week, poisoning the air of Pevsner’s Wolseley Hornet. After an eight-hour day on the road, he smuggled fish and chips into his cheap hotel, occasionally allowing himself a half-pint of Bass or an ice lolly; the 1968 Bedfordshire volume was dedicated to the ice lolly’s inventor.

He also had to deal with ritual humiliation by homeowners. In the early 1960s, when he visited Narford Hall, Suffolk, with his wife, the son of the house bellowed, ‘They’ve come to read the meter, Ma.’ Only this month, the Telegraph obituary of a Berkshire landowner, Alan Godsal, recorded how he wouldn’t let Pevsner into his Jacobean house, Haines Hill.

These days, to be in Pevsner is an accolade; Country Life property adverts regularly say a house is ‘Mentioned in Pevsner’. But, still, a little anti-Pevsner feeling lingers on. As recently as 2003, Simon Bradley and John Schofield, who wrote the updated volume on Westminster, weren’t allowed inside White’s.

In Susie Harries’s convincing account, Pevsner was a victim of anti-German, anti-academic and anti-Semitic feelings for much of his life.