On the Shoulders of Architectural Giants

Fr Jeremy, the Roman Catholic parish priest, used to sit on the board of the Surrey Churches Preservation Trust and suggested we go to a Trust lecture at Merrow yesterday on the revision of Pevsner's Buildings of England volume for Surrey. It's seventy years since the first edition and forty years since the last revision carried out by Bridget Cherry, and now Charles O'Brien has revisited the whole county to complete the latest one. The talk gave a bit of background to the Buildings series - I hadn't realised that Pevsner got the idea from an earlier series of architectural monographs covering German regions, or how much of a popular audience the volumes were pitched at when first released; Penguin Books produced posters announcing 'The only comprehensive book about the buildings of your county', for instance. We had a whistlestop tour of Surrey churches and discovered that the original house in Stanwell where Dr Pevsner first sat at a table with Allen Lane from Penguin and conceived the idea for the series still exists. We learned how Pevsner's collaborator Ian Nairn wrote far more of the Surrey volume than anyone has tended to realise. I was delighted to learn that some omissions have been made good: St Mark's Hale with its fantastic wall paintings is in the revised volume, when the existing one not only overlooked it completely but called the other church in Hale, St John's, by the wrong name. 

Fr Jeremy has long had a responsibility for the fabric of Roman Catholic churches across the Arundel diocese and some of these are quite recent in date, as former bishop Cormac O'Connor insisted that each deanery should have one major church in it, which often meant building new ones: he asked Mr O'Brien whether he could think of particularly good churches built in the 21st century, or failing that good secular buildings. The author was forced to admit a little shame-facedly that the new Guildford Crematorium chapel wasn't in the revised book, as he was familiar with the old one and hadn't thought it worth while to go and check its replacement, 'and actually it's quite good. But it can go in the next edition'. We were all encouraged to get the new book, and if you order through the Yale University Press and quote PEV22 you can get a discount. There was one copy there at the lecture, and so many people crowded round it to look I didn't get to check whether Swanvale Halt church's entry was any improvement on the old one, which amounted to three words: 'dull lancet chapel'.