Do you speak Pevsner? Readers of the Suffolk volumes in the Buildings of England series, if they are new to this odd, intriguing writer, may be surprised to find themselves sent on “perambulations” around towns, on which distances are measured in yards. They may be directed inside an early 15th-century church where the south aisle is decorated with “a delicious openwork parapet of quatrefoils each with a little ogee hat”, and outside, towards an entirely unexceptional building described simply as “curiously lopsided”. Nikolaus Pevsner was a master of wit and bathos as well as of architectural history.
James Bettley is proving to be one of Pevsner’s most respectful successors, the antithesis of that Just William of architectural history, Ian Nairn, who co-wrote the original volumes about Surrey and West Sussex and mingled opinion, hyperbole and irreverence with the requisite information. Usually Pevsner was far more sparing with his subjective responses, but at St Andrew church in Felixstowe – begun in 1929 by Raymond Erith and his fellow Architectural Association student Hilda Mason – the muscular translation of East Anglian Gothic into a 20th-century rendering in concrete and glass left him unusually uncertain: “One can look at the building in either way according to one’s mood”. Bettley adds, usefully, that Auguste Perret’s much admired church at Raincy, completed a few years earlier, was probably the inspiration.
His stated object is to “add rather than alter”. The tone of voice throughout is still Pevsner’s. “Brick, it will be remembered … ”, he admonishes, as if the reader has started to show signs of loss of concentration. And yet, some touches of period charm have been lost in his telling. For Pevsner, a windmill was always “she”, but here it becomes genderless – losing that cheerful whiff of the sea that seems so appropriate when referring to a building with sails.
Bettley cut his teeth on Essex, the county that Pevsner naughtily set up as the nadir of his experiences, picturing himself embarking in the “suicidal” gloom of early 1950s Liverpool Street station: the new author gave his home county a dose of adrenaline and a second chance.
For Suffolk the auguries were better. Pevsner’s circumnavigation of the county during an exceptionally pleasant August, with his long-suffering wife, Lola, at the wheel, proved a happier experience. Yet the quantity and quality of the churches (the nickname “Silly Suffolk” is said to come from selig – blessed) and the timber-framed merchant houses from cloth-making centres such as Hadleigh, Glemsford and Lavenham were overwhelming. Pevsner reported that, at least by the 20th-century standards, “one can almost be silent”. It was left to Enid Radcliffe, editing the 1974 edition, to slip in references to the GLC Expanding Towns programme, several thousand new houses and many factories wrapped around modest, bemused, market towns across the county.
Bettley’s considerable achievement has been to master the mountains of new research that have emerged since publication in 1961 and to slip the salient material into place. The county that for Pevsner was “full of delights and of temptation for study” has now generated no fewer than eight pages of suggested further reading. Fewer churchgoers may be a sad sign of the health of the Church of England but it has been good news for the visiting public since churches are more often open, thanks to the redoubtable Churches Conservation Trust and its volunteers (according to their app, at least twenty Suffolk churches are cared for, and opened, by the CCT). And private houses are more widely accessible than they used to be, as the result of open days and visiting arrangements. But, more generally, it is still the very inaccessibility of Suffolk that makes it so appealing – its trunk roads and its illogically truncated railway routes make its many insider devotees only more impassioned.
The further east you go, the more marked becomes the East Anglian spirit, cussed and independent. Coastal Suffolk was a magnet for eccentrics and entrepreneurs. At Orwell Park, George Tomline, who speedily amassed a fortune from railways and the development of the port at Felixstowe, extended his house with a four-floor octagonal Observatory topped by a copper-clad dome, and featuring a ground-floor Turkish bath. The telescope, inaugurated in 1874, still works. Earlier, Sir Morton Peto at Somerleyton had sunk his fortune – also based on the railways – into an estate near Lowestoft (building a mansion, model village and, naturally, a station) before the banks foreclosed on him, allowing the Crossleys, carpet magnates from Halifax, to slip into his shoes. Another railway developer, Alexander Stuart Ogilvie, built an escapist holiday village in the early 1900s, Thorpeness, reflecting the child’s world of JM Barrie, a family friend. For himself, Ogilvie built a museum for his unrivalled stuffed bird collection (the building remains, the taxidermy gone).
Richard Garrett ran his immense agricultural engineering works at Leiston, while his brother Newson founded Snape Maltings. The Garrett daughters, Millicent and Elizabeth, left home and achieved great things – the vote and entry into the medical profession, respectively – while a necklace of nearby village churches benefited from the skills of the formidable women from the Rope dynasty, one of those footnotes in the Arts and Crafts movement that have been deleted from the pages of art history.
If the pioneers and modernisers were drawn east, the mood and wealth of independent-minded, ambitious Suffolk men tugged them in the opposite direction. John Winthrop left from Groton in 1630 to become governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, as Bettley adds.
The Millennium Commission-funded Gothic-revival crossing tower of the cathedral in Bury St Edmunds, completed in 2005, is a surprising choice for the front cover of Suffolk: West, but Bettley ranges widely across contemporary work, moving from Walter Segal’s first self-built house to recent additions in the Living Architecture adventure. He praises a new house “that appears to have grown over the centuries” entirely without the “inconveniences” of a traditional house, but misses the only surviving building designed by the late critic Martin Pawley, a hunched concrete-and-glass house tucked into an apple orchard near Sudbury. Nearby is the better-known Long Melford church, “one of the most moving parish churches in England, large, proud and noble”. The words are, like the spirit behind the entire enterprise, indelibly Pevsner’s own.
• Gillian Darley is co-author, with David McKie, of Ian Nairn: Words in Place (Five Leaves). To order East and West Suffolk for go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
- This article was amended on 9 July 2015 to include a reference to the Churches Conservation Trust, which had been removed in the original edit.
