Pevsner Architectural Guides

The Pevsner Architectural Guides are a series of guide books to the architecture of the British Isles. Begun in the 1940s by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the 46 volumes of the original Buildings of England series were published between 1951 and 1974. The series was then extended to Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the late 1970s. The Irish guides are incomplete as of autumn 2016. Most of the English volumes have had second editions, chiefly by other authors.

The final Scottish volume, Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire, was published in Autumn 2016. This completed the series' coverage of Great Britain in the 65th anniversary year of their inception.

After moving to Great Britain from his native Germany in the 1930s, Nikolaus Pevsner found that the study of architectural history had little status in academic circles, and that the amount of information available, especially to travellers wanting to inform themselves about the architecture of a particular district, was limited. He conceived a project to write a series of comprehensive county guides to rectify this, and gained the backing of Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, for whom he had written his Outline of European Architecture.

Work on the series began in 1945. Lane employed two part-time assistants, both German refugee art historians, who prepared notes for Pevsner from published sources. Pevsner spent the academic holidays touring the country to make personal observations and to carry out local research, before writing up the finished volumes. The first volume was published in 1951. Pevsner wrote 32 of the books himself and ten with collaborators, with a further four of the original series written by others: the two Gloucestershire volumes by David Verey, and the two volumes on Kent by John Newman. Newman is the only author in the series to have written a volume and revised it three times.

Since Pevsner's death, work has continued on the series, with several volumes now in their third revision, and three in their fourth editions.

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