Topographic Culture: Nikolaus Pevsner and the Buildings of England

Languages of geography are a key social and political force. Narratives of space and place increasingly preoccupy historians, geographers, anthropologists and others concerned with the shaping of identities at various social and geographical scales.1 This essay considers one element of what I refer to as 'topographic culture' in mid twentieth-century England, asking how an influential set of architectural guides makes sense in terms of expressions of cultural authority, effects of descriptive style, relations of tradition and modernity, renditions of county and local identity, and the cultural politics of geographical scale. In their 1995 article in History Workshop Journal Felix Driver and Raphael Samuel called for more attention to be paid to such issues in relation to the idea of place, drawing on Doreen Massey's distinction between progressive and reactionary senses of place, with the former presenting place as open rather than strictly bounded, alive to plural historical connections rather than defending an internalist history, embracing multiple identities rather than single definitions.2 While Massey's arguments are a corrective to commonplace assumptions which associate place with rooted conservatism, it is not necessarily the case that awareness of interconnection and multiplicity denotes a politically progressive geographical understanding. Massey's alignment of the progressive with a 'global sense of place' can indeed produce its own kind of closure, whatever the intention. Love for the particular may in consequence be too easily figured as myopic cultural reaction; introversion can appear necessarily exclusionary, singularities may be reduced to insular cultural exceptionalism.3 As recent commentaries on the local as well as the global suggest, a more nuanced cultural politics of scale may be required.4 The history of socialist politics, as of any other political formation, suggests that it is difficult strictly to align particular ways of geographical thinking with particular political values. Paradoxically a classification of senses of place as progressive or reactionary may, while seeming to raise the political importance of geography, actually serve to divert attention from the complex political powers, affiliations and emotions of geographical knowledge. This essay considers one element of a particular topographic culture, the work of Nikolaus Pevsner on the buildings of England, a project of geographical knowledge in the non-disciplinary sense of that term. It might well be possible to present Pevsner as representing a progressive sense of place