The Herald

Nicholas Pevsner made an invaluable contribution to European culture. He began the meticulous process of noting all the buildings of worth in these islands, and his history of European architecture is a standard work. In the current climate he would have been refused British citizenship as a self-seeking immigrant planning to sponge off the state, but thankfully the east European discovered things were more civilised in the first half of the twentieth century. Pevsner's seminal history begins with an attempt to define what is architecture. He makes a distinction between a building and a shed. To the dons of twentieth-century England, such distinctions between art and non-art were commonplace. We live in more democratic times now, and our prejudice towards crafts is diminished. We should be grateful for this. If you accept only gothic cathedrals and neo-palladian villas as buildings of note, you miss out not only on a lot of fascinating places, but also the true sweep of European history. Churches, palaces and castles may signal the grand shifts in power, but workers cottages, sheds and factories show how the majority lived and died.