Meeting the Editor of Pevsner

As I walked past Blackwell's Art bookshop on Broad St in Oxford this afternoon I was approached by a gentleman who asked if I would take his photograph next to one of the shop windows as one of the books was by him, and his publishers would like to see it. The book in questuion was a guide to English Church architecture designed to accompany the Buildings of England series founded by, and still thought of as being by, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner.

I was happy to oblige, and found that my interlocutor was Dr Simon Bradley the current editor-in-chief of Pevsner. I expressed my almost life-long appreciation for the series, and said how I had once kept a little list of emendations for the West Riding volume when I still lived in Yorkshire. He suggested I send him that, which I will do, when I have reconstructed it from memory.

A very pleasant encounter, and illustrative of the peopel one meets on the streets of Oxford.

Catching out Pevsner

Following my visit on Sunday to St Mary Magdalen's Brighton I thought I would see what Pevsner, and his revisers and editors, say about the building. A trip to the bookshelves to look at Sussex revealed that they had little to say - in fact they have nothing at all to say. I did not have time to look at the new, additional, volume in the series specifically on Brighton and Hove to see if that included the church.

Now I know that not all nineteenth century churches of all denominations make it to the pages of Pevsner - a fact which betrays a prejudice of the era which initially produced The Buildings of England, but one which ought now to be being rectified. However St Mary Magdalen's is a fine building by a decent architect, and omitting it seems rather silly in looking at a city one of whose principal architectural interests is its collection of nineteenth century churches. Pevsner certainly got to the end of Upper North Street as he includes the ancient parish church of St Nicholas, less than five minutes walk away. Without falling into Catholic paranoia I suspect that had it been an Anglican church it would have made the list. So, to make up, here is the Wikipedia entry on the church. Bit rum that Wikipedia is better than Pevsner in these matters when you think about it.