In the 1940s, a refugee from Nazi Germany called Nikolaus Pevsner started travelling round the lanes and streets of England, armed with sheaves of notes compiled in advance from lengthy research, cataloguing the noteworthy structures in meticulous-going-on-obsessive detail. It was an outsider’s act of love for his adopted country, a homage to the recently imperilled heritage of a nation that had survived war. The outcome was the Buildings of England series of county-by-county guidebooks, a literary national monument now known collectively as Pevsners.
He finished his labours in 1974, only for the process of revision to start. In 1983, Penguin started bringing out new and expanded editions in a larger format, a project carried out since 2002 by Yale University Press. The last of these, on Staffordshire, has now been published. There is talk of digital versions, but no more printed books are in prospect in the Buildings of England series. An epic endeavour, nearly 80 years old, is complete.
