The ultimate guide to Cornwall

Before writing this review I spent an hour looking for my original Pevsner paperback on Cornwall, published in 1951 (the first in the ‘Buildings of England’ series). It was falling apart, but I always took it with me on an architectural jaunt, together with my father John Betjeman’s Shell Guide to Cornwall, of course. The two books were good companions. The Pevsner was littered with notes in the margin, made by my dad, like ‘absolute balls,’ ‘what?’ or ‘wrong’ underlined. (I did not find the tattered book and can only conclude that some light-fingered book dealer has stolen it within the last year.)

Admittedly there were inaccuracies but with no official buildings ‘list’ at the time, Nikolaus Pevsner was out on his own. His chief interest was always the churches and he never presumed to write much about ‘place’. If a village had no noteworthy buildings he would simply leave it out, however picturesque it happened to be.