Upcoming Events

Celebrating Pevsner: Reflections on the Completion of the Buildings of England with Simon Bradley and Charles O'Brien

Lecture – Jeremy Musson, Charles O'Brien, Simon Bradley

  • 14 November 2024
  • 6:00 – 7:30 pm
  • Online only

The editors of the Pevsner Architectural Guides will be in conversation, reflecting on the revision of the Buildings of England series from 1983 to 2024, lately completed with the new Staffordshire volume. Simon Bradley and Charles O'Brien will consider the development and updating of the guides over forty years, the expansion of their content and the challenges both of research and writing and of maintaining the spirit and ambition of Pevsner's original vision for the books. They will also reflect on their own contributions as authors of the new and revised editions, spanning their time with Penguin Books and Yale University Press.

The event will be chaired by Jeremy Musson.

About the speakers

  • Jeremy Musson is an architectural historian; he studied at UCL and the Warburg Institute and was an assistant curator for the National Trust and architectural editor at Country Life, 1998–2007. He is the author of a number of books on the country house, including English Country House Interiors (2011) and The Drawing Room (2014), and was co-writer and presenter of BBC2’s The Curious House Guest. A heritage consultant since 2007, Jeremy has worked on projects including Hardwick Hall and St Paul’s Cathedral. He is editor of The Victorian and teaches on the building history masters course at the University of Cambridge; a senior research fellow of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Buckingham; and a supervisor of students at New York University (NYU) in London. He is also a trustee of the Historic Houses Foundation. He was a contributing author to the revision of the Buildings of England: Sussex West with Elizabeth Williamson, Tim Hudson and Ian Narin. 

  • Charles O'Brien in front of a bookcase

    Charles O’Brien FSA is Listing and Architectural Research Director at Historic England. Until 2022 he was joint Series Editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides. He joined the series in 1997, where he worked full time on the research, writing and editing of the new editions. As author and co-author he has written the revised volumes London 5: East, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Peterborough, Hampshire: South and Surrey. He is a former Commissioner of Historic England and former Chair of their London Advisory Committee. 

  • Head and shoulders portrait of Simon Bradley.

    Simon Bradley FSA joined the Pevsner series in 1994. His own revised volumes include London 1: The City of London, London 6: Westminster, Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire: Oxford and the South East. He has also published on the Gothic Revival, drawing on his PhD thesis, and on railways and railway buildings including St Pancras Station (2006), The Railways: Nation, Network and People (2015) and Bradley's Railway Guide: A Journey Through Two Centuries of British Railway History, 1825–2025 (2024).