I WAS GIVEN MY FIRST COPY OF NIKOLAUS Pevsner’s Buildings of England in the summer of 1967 when I was going off to boarding school and my kind Aunt Margaret gave me the Wiltshire volume, which had been published in 1963. My first weekend I cycled off to see the church at Clyffe Pypard, which strictly was out-of-bounds, with Pevsner in my pocket.
I have been accompanied by copies of Pevsner and his fatter successors on trips to churches, towns and, more recently, modern buildings ever since, although, truth-to-tell, as they have become bigger and more comprehensive, they have become more like works of reference to be consulted at home, rather than used as guidebooks in one’s pocket.
to an end and in 1974. was mostly done by Jennifer Sherwood, an architectural historian who was working in the Royal Library at Windsor, since Pevsner was essentially a Cambridge man, a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge and still delivering annual lectures in the history faculty (not history of art).
