Pevsner

Morning sunlight, or any light, could not conceal the ugliness of the Tallis home—barely forty years old, bright orange brick, squat, lead-paned baronial Gothic, to be condemned one day in an article by Pevsner, or one of his team, as a tragedy of wasted chances, and by a younger writer of the modern school as “charmless to a fault.”

It's at Matlock Bath that I meet architectural historian Clare Hartwell, who has just finished revising the 1951 Pevsner guide to Derbyshire.

I feel a little disloyal to Mutton as we chat together - although the Penguin county guides were reissued in 1947, it was the publication of more comprehensive, intellectual guides like Pevsner that ultimately led to the death of the Penguin guide.

As Nikolaus Pevsner wrote about an earlier impulse in architecture, toward modernism: “If the new style is bare, if it goes straight to the point, there are reasons for it.”

The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner called the Brownian landscape park “England’s greatest contribution to the visual arts.”