New Revised Pevsner

A lack of reverence makes this revised Pevsner one of the best in the series, writes Robert Harbison 

The Buildings of England: Worcestershire, by Alan Brooks and Nikolaus Pevsner. Yale. 846pp. £29.95

Worcestershire is one of the very best of the revised Pevsner Architectural Guides. The infectious enthusiasm of author Alan Brooks frequently breaks through, although he doesn't depart dramatically from the tone of the series. Brooks has the temerity (not shared by all revisers) to rethink even Nikolaus Pevsner's descriptions of medieval churches, one of the sacrosanct elements of the guides. I yield to no one in my gratitude to Pevsner, but I am not a great fan of his minute anatomies of medieval buildings. However, in Brooks' revision this detail is given new point and stops being tedious. The best thing about the new volume, though, is what has happened to the 19th and early 20th centuries. It isn't exactly unexpected that Brooks' sense of history differs from Pevsner's, and not simply because he writes out of the moment we're living in now, though that is part of it. This moment is, among other things, one in which old barns, lovingly restored and studied, are not really farm buildings any more, and in which old gardens, reconstructed in their lost form (17th-century Dutch, say) by bodies like the National Trust, are not gardens in the old sense but viewable objects, places of contemplation perhaps, but also crowd-pullers. About gardens in general, Brooks is more alert than
Pevsner was, as most new contributors to the series have been.
On the 19th century, the new Worcestershire volume is quite special. From a wonderfully heated discussion of a minor Victorian church in Kidderminster to the fantastically serious account of Bodley and Garner's Hewell Grange, now an open prison with a Great Hall covered in Bavarian frescoes, Brooks gives that century equal space with the earlier ones and integrates it forward and back. For him the 19th century is part of a continuum, not an interruption or violation. There's a nice moment in the old parish church at Kidderminster when Brooks speaks enthusiastically about a chapel added by
George Gilbert Scott – a chapel Pevsner mistook for 16th century. The point is that to
Brooks, it isn't surprising that the contribution of a 19th-century architect should take its place next to what came before, while for Pevsner it was an intrusion or defacement.

There is so much to enjoy in this remarkable, indefatigable volume. Chance details, such as the never-installed clock face that survives in the ringing chamber of a church somewhere, are inessential, but shed genuine light on how buildings happen or don't happen. Pevsner gave the impression that Little Malvern Priory wasn't particularly worthwhile; Brooks has revived it partly by
his attention to blocked features in the surviving walls of the ruin, details unexpectedly incorporated in the full-page plan.
The building plans are a strength of the new Worcestershire; so are country houses of all dates. Luckily many of them, like the major churches, have long thin plans that fill whole pages neatly. Brooks is stronger too on human connections: Pevsner may have known that Randall Wells ran off with the client's wife, and that this is why Besford Court was never to be finished by Wells or occupied by Sir George Noble, but he left it out. He also left out the Chartist colony at Dodford, though he appreciated the not-unconnected Arts and Crafts church, about which Brooks supplies interesting detail on the fittings and brings the story up to date. As sometimes happens, the earlier work has inspired more, which matches so well it's hard to detect. Brooks didn't know or didn't include that the vicar at Dodford was a fresh-air fiend, hence the odd outdoor pulpit.
Brooks has ferreted out rich and varied material, from the contributions of vicars' wives (one of whom wrote a book on ancient embroidery that William Butterfield helped to publish) to the 'flagrantly picturesque' Hollywood Arts and Crafts house built by the cinema architect Harry Weedon in theprosperous suburb of Barnt Green – just two random samples in a volume that brings whole new territories to light.

Resume: Pevsner's guide with a splash of Worcestershire sauce: more anecdotes, more plans and a smattering of 19th and 20th century