Oh Brother, where art thou?

Benjamin Franklin had this ambition for his body: that after his death it should be reissued ‘in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the author’.

Benjamin Franklin had this ambition for his body: that after his death it should be reissued ‘in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the author’. That is roughly what has happened with The Buildings of England guide to Hampshire. The guides used to fit into an overcoat pocket; now you’d need the glove compartment of a car. High praise is due to the authors of this volume for careful scholarship, an outstanding array of colour illustrations, and a literary style which is not drily academic, but relaxed and colloquial.

The Buildings of England series was inaugurated by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in 1951. The feud between Pevsner and John Betjeman has been raked over. To the poet, Pevsner was a ‘Herr Professor Doktor’, a baldly categorising academic of Teutonic thoroughness. To Pevsner, Betjeman was a frivolous dilettante. Neither characterisation was fair, but there was a germ of truth in each.

It was said of Betjeman that, when looking at architecture, he was always ‘as interested in the shellfish as in the shell’. In other words, he cared about the people who had lived in, or been associated with, buildings, not just the fabric. By the title of their series, its editors are relieved of any such concern. Stones are their quarry in both senses.

If the series is to retain its convenient compactness, it is crying for the moon to yearn for ‘human interest stories’. Conceding that Jane Austen lived in ‘Jane Austen’s House at Chawton’ is about as far as the editors are prepared to go. But I yearn all the same. It is odd to find the village of Tichborne covered with not a smidgen about the Tichborne Claimant — the portly central figure of one of the great Victorian causes célèbres.