UK Edition
When Nikolaus Pevsner finished his quarter-century odyssey in 1974 and completed his monumental 46-volume work The Buildings of England, he ended with Staffordshire. The county now rounds off the even more monumental revision of the series, which began with the publication in 1983 of London: South and now runs to 54 volumes.
Why Staffordshire was Pevsner’s last county is unclear: certainly not because its buildings were unexceptional, as the new volume shows. Lichfield Cathedral is possibly the most famous, with its three spires and walled close, which the guide describes as “more complete than most”. The Norman rebuilding of the pre-Conquest church started in 1088, but it was the 14th century before the cathedral was finished.
However, it was wrecked during the Civil Wars. The royalists fortified the close in 1643, and it was besieged. Not only did the building undergo three bombardments, but parliamentary soldiers “misbehaved” – the guide’s word – inside it. The medieval glass and grand marble tombs that offended the puritan orthodoxy were destroyed. The central spire collapsed and the roofing was largely ruined.
The guide calls the restoration of 1662-69 under Bishop John Hacket, who paid for much of it, “a remarkable and dedicated achievement”, but thereafter the cathedral underwent various changes. In the 1790s, James Wyatt took out a century-old reredos and what remained of its medieval predecessor. The central spire was rebuilt, but the long open space Wyatt created inside the building angered antiquarians.
From 1842, Sydney Smirke sought to reconstruct as much of the pre-Civil Wars cathedral as possible; he was not radical enough for the dean and chapter. They brought in George Gilbert Scott in 1857, who restored medieval detail wherever he could trace it while undoing much of Wyatt’s innovation. Together with his son, J Oldrid Scott, he ensured every niche that had once had a statue now had one again: and Lichfield’s statuary is, to the visitor, one of its most remarkable features.
The guide also reminds one of Staffordshire’s great houses. One, Tixall Hall, a fine timber house of 1555, was pulled down to accommodate a Georgian palace, which itself went in 1927, during an era of shocking country-house demolitions. Yet its astonishingly fine stone gatehouse of 1575 remains. It is not far from Ingestre Hall, a model Jacobean house restored in 1808 by John Nash; also of the early 17th century is Robert Smythson’s Wootton Lodge, which adorns the guide’s dust wrapper.
The county’s most palatial house is Shugborough, built by various hands between the 17th and 19th centuries, notably Thomas Wright and the brothers Samuel and Benjamin Wyatt; its most fabulous is Alton Towers, which the 15th and 16th Earls of Shrewsbury built in a style the guide defines as “Catholic romanticism” in the first half of the 19th century, designed by Pugin. The house fell into ruin after the last war and is still being restored.
Staffordshire’s other feature is its industrial architecture: it includes the Potteries, or Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns (actually, six). Stoke-on-Trent has several fine late-Georgian works buildings, and the guide commends the 17-bay Boundary Works at Longton, dating from 1819. From a later era is the fine Victorian Wedgwood Institute in Burslem, by Nicholls and others from the 1860s.
Architectural scholars have asked what happens now: does this completed revision stand for all time as a snapshot of the fabric of a nation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, steadily outdated not just as buildings fall and rise, but as scholarship advances? My colleague Christopher Howse has questioned the plan to put it all online, with some sort of rolling revision. To be able to read the text on a smartphone while out in the field would be useful, but the act of revision needs to be co-ordinated and not piecemeal.
Our universities teem with gifted art and architectural historians equal to the task of a third revision. If Yale cannot or will not afford to do it, one of our great university presses should take it up. Surely there is a civilised philanthropist somewhere who could underwrite the necessary expense, and thereby keep this great monument, too, from slowly eroding.
At last, the revised Pevsner is complete – now, let’s start over again
The Staffordshire volume rounds off Pevsner’s monumental guide to the nation’s greatest buildings. But what happens next?