Pevsner’s Isle of Man
Jonathan Kewley (Yale, £45)
UNTIL the publication of Jonathan Kewley’s book, my scant knowledge about the ancient kingdom of Man amounted to the deathly TT motorcycle races, Manx cats without tails, Baillie Scott’s inventive Arts-and-Crafts houses and Sir John Betjeman’s elegiac essay, when he went ‘tramping knee-deep in blaeberry bushes on the wild west coast’, was exhilarated by the narrow-gauge railways and transfixed by the Tynwald Day celebrations. Now, Dr Kewley has transported me there in a rarity for Yale’s ‘Pevsner Architectural Guides’: a ‘Pevsner’ without any input from the great man.
The author believes Man “has long had a chip on its shoulder” about its architecture and he rectifies this
Although recent guides have been revisions of his originals, Pevsner never got round to Man before completing the English series in 1974. As a result, Dr Kewley, albeit tied to the usual gazetteer
