Heritage Now #10

IN CONVERSATION

self. So the revisions owe a great debt to Pevsner both as the founder of the series and its house style, and for his detailed descriptions. The original volume for Staffordshire was published 50 years ago. For many, myself included, the process behind updating such a detailed work is difficult to comprehend. How long does it take and what are the processes involved? We normally allow three years’ full-time work to research, visit and write up a county volume, after which it takes nearly a year for the finished book to appear. Every surviving building in the old edition is inspected (access permitting) and the author makes his or her selection of historic buildings to add and newer ones to include. Most of the original descriptions will also be corrected, updated and enhanced – for instance, a medieval parish church may be given a fuller account of its fabric, restorations, furnishings and monuments, and even modest house entries may be upgraded with firmer dates and information on designers and patrons. Major buildings such as cathedrals and great houses present their own challenges, as there may be masses of secondary literature to read and assess, and the old descriptions often require some serious reworking. Likewise, entries for towns and cities are usually upgraded with fresh perambulations, both to include more buildings and to allow for physical changes. When all the ground is covered at last, the hard-pressed author must sit down to write a fresh introduc tion – Pevsner’s old introductions tend to be too skimpy to rework for the revised books – and that can be the hardest stage of all. But we also bring in specialist contributors to cover the ar chaeological sections and other specific themes which helps to lift the burden. Yale University Press has been publishing the revised county guides since 2002, that is quite a commitment from a publisher to a single project. What do you think Yale, with support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, has brought to the project? Revision of the whole English series since 1983 has allowed the books to remain a definitive resource as the study of architectural history has developed and matured.

of that time, the research and writing costs for the English revisions have been covered by long term funding from the Paul Mellon Centre which stepped into the breach after grants and dona tions from other sources began to fall away. Be fore the Mellon era we were supported by our own

Yale has provided an ideal home for the series since the move from Penguin in 2002. For much

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HERITAGE NOW (03/2024) WINTER 2024