I’ve been reading Susie Harries’ book Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life – it’s dead
good. Of course, the books in Pevsner’s
Buildings of England contain “perambulations,” self-guided routes that enable
you to walk round a place and look at the architecture Pevsner found worthy of
attention. So it’s no surprise to
anybody that he was a great walker.
Even so I was quite tickled by the above
photograph in the book, which is captioned,
“The Professor in Mufti: Pevsner with Lola and two of their
grandchildren on holiday in the Tyrol, 1961.
In Who’s Who he listed his
recreation as ‘twelve-mile walks’.”
When Pevsner first wrote about the
buildings of London he divided the place into two volumes, one for Westminster
and the City, and one for the rest. This
caused some amusing consternation among the staff at Penguin. Editor Alan Glover (who according to Harries
and other sources had once worked as a tattooed man in a circus) wrote, “I can only say that if I
were walking from Charing Cross to the Bank making a rapid study of architecture
I should be a bit disturbed at having to carry one fat volume in my right-hand
trousers pocket and another fat volume in my left, and as you may have observed
I am not over-particular about the set of my trousers.”
