Buildings of England: East and West Suffolk by James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner – review

Whether describing Long Melford church or a hammam, the latest successor to a great architectural historian adds to, rather than alters, the spirit of his classic guides to Suffolk

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.

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