Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England: Surrey
Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry
(Yale University Press, £45)
ONE of the simplest ways of attempting to quantify the change in scope between revisions of the ‘Buildings of England’ series—familiarly known as ‘Pevsners’—and the volumes they replace is by putting them on the kitchen scales. It can’t claim to be scientific, but it is illustrative of how the books have evolved. In this case, the original volume on Surrey of 1962, the first written jointly by the eponymous architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner with a co-contributor, the brilliant and opinionated critic Ian Nairn, weighed in with 501 pages—well over half a pound. That increased to 1lb and 600 pages when it was revised by Bridget Cherry in 1971.
