London 6. Westminster

Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series is a very twentieth century phenomenon. Research for the work began in 1947 when Pevsner, a German émigré, was driven around England by his wife in a borrowed 1933 Wolseley Hornet. The motor car has been blamed for many social and ecological evils, but it is doubtful if the books could have been produced, county by county, so quickly without the ability to travel around England so freely. This freedom of movement also increased the market for Pevsner’s titles as they began to be published, starting with the volume on Cornwall in 1951 and...