You may own ‘a Pevsner’ or two, or more, to help you with your architectural conservation and history, but did you know that a lunch with Nikolaus Pevsner in a Westminster pub in the spring of 1967 led to the ‘Buildings of Ireland’ publications programme, as series lead Prof. Alistair Rowan – Adam authority and former Principal at Edinburgh College of Art – recounts in his own fascinating, personal history, from issue 163 of Context.
image: Context 163, p18, Alistair Rowan
Alistair Rowan writes:
In the spring of 2020, the sixth volume of The Buildings of Ireland will be published by Yale University Press. Written by Frank Keohane and covering Cork, city and county, the book will be unique within the series as the only volume to consider a single county on its own.
There are 32 counties in Ireland and Cork is the 16th county to be completed. The notion of a Buildings of Ireland series, to complement Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s celebrated Buildings of England, arose at a lunch in St Stephen’s Tavern, close to Westminster Bridge, beside the Houses of Parliament, where I had agreed to meet Pevsner. At that time, I worked as an architectural editor at Country Life magazine and he, among many jobs, was joint editor with Jim Richards of The Architectural Review. The pub was Pevsner’s suggestion since it was close to the ‘Archi Rev offices’. It was April or May 1967. I was a 28-year old architectural historian and conservationist, anxious to do something to halt the reckless destruction of historic buildings in my native Ulster; NP, as we all called him, was 65 and clearly pleased that anyone would want to copy and extend to Ireland, the type of architectural guides which he had pioneered for England, with Allen Lane of Penguin Books.
Pevsner was enthusiastic about my idea and immediately explained how his own volumes were funded. The first and cardinal point was that he took no payment from Penguin Books for doing the visiting and writing his texts, only a royalty…
While the physical area of Ireland is just under two thirds that of England, the population in the two countries is radically different…
A second huge difference between England and Ireland, at least in the 1970s and 80s, was the amount of architectural history already published in the two countries. For England there were many sets of important studies, like the Victoria County Histories, publications of The Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments, monographs on individual architects, individual county histories and, an important additional source which Pevsner relied on, the provisional lists of buildings prepared by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. No similar sources existed for Ireland.
The visiting for the first volume was carried out during the summer vacations of 1970 and 1971, when we drove around, Derry, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone in a converted, 15 cwt Commer camper van in which we worked, slept and ate. The van made a cramped home for two months, but it allowed us to stop where we were each day and start again next morning without loss of driving time. We went down every road shown on the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps, and visited each church and every site that was marked in antique script.
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