Erudite detail is tempered by a certain popular appeal in Nikolaus Pevsner’s encyclopedic Buildings of England series. The forty-six volumes that Penguin first published between 1951 and 1974 were as thick as some editions of the Bible, and as authoritative—and nearly as readable. Embraced in the UK as modern lore, the architectural guides made an essential contribution to twentieth-century “topographic culture.”1JSAH reviewer Alan Gowans praised the series in 1956, noting, “Scholarship at once meticulous and broad is combined with the informality of a personally conducted tour. … In such a program the essential thing is to hold a reader’s interest, to make him not only aware of facts, but interested in them, or … anxious to see, preserve, and perpetuate them.”2 Half a century later, a Guardian columnist similarly celebrated Pevsner’s “sparse, engaging style” for “making architecture accessible.”3
While it is true that Pevsner and his...
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