Heritage Now

26   HISTORIC BUILDINGS & PLACES BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS unrepresented building types that you had to include in the new volume? While there has been a great deal added to knowl- edge about Pevsner’s major buildings, tree-ring dating for example at Salisbury Cathedral, Great Chalfield Manor and the Great Barn at Tisbury, the revision gives attention to types previously undervalued or left out. There are the war me- morials of the first world war, hangars from the beginnings of military flying around 1912, and medium-sized Georgian houses, especially those associated with the clothiers of western Wiltshire. The record office plans for parsonages from the late 18th century onwards reveal a middle-class house type of considerable architectural ingenu- ity. And of course the surviving parts of the huge railway endeavour at Swindon, virtually inacces- sible in 1963 and 1975, are now open to all. Pevsner’s great legacy is the championing of the provincial architect. Was there an architect in Wiltshire whose work you became particularly fond of during your research? While compiling the volume, I kept, as I did for Somerset and Wales, an index of architects working in the county (available to access on my website). Gradually pictures of local archi- tects emerged. It has to be said that the Wiltshire profession barely has a face before the early 19th century, certainly not enough is known to reveal an unknown Georgian master, although there are plenty of houses whose designer remains un- known. In the 19th century my favourite architect was not local but James Thomson (1800-83), a Scotsman who initially worked for John Nash in London and then from around c1827-56 for Joseph Neeld in Wiltshire, designing for him, cottag- es, churches, almshouses, farmhouses, most of the mansion at Grittleton and the town hall in Chippenham. Sevington and Leigh Delamere have Thomson’s barge-boarded cottages with trian- gular oriels. Nearer Grittleton are lodges with eccentric towers, said improbably to be used to semaphore Neeld’s return to the house. The work of Charles Edwin Ponting (1850-1932) of Marlbor- ough, late-Victorian to Arts and Crafts, deserves a full-length study. One masterpiece by a lit- tle-known local architect is Richard Gane’s Abbey Mill, Bradford-on-Avon of 1875. He died in Sydney two years later. Nikolaus and Lola Pevsner are buried at St Peter’s church Clyffe Pypard, Royal Wootton Bassett, close to Broad Town where they had a cottage. Did you ever feel their presence when you were visiting areas that would have been so familiar to them? I felt the presence of Pevsner, with whom I had worked in the 1970s, at the grave at Clyffe Pypard and near his cottage beneath the white horse at Broad Town and on the top of that escarpment looking out over the vale. Although he did not write the introduction to the geology, he writes appreciatively of the different stones, especially the sarsens of the Marlborough Downs, so he too must have visited the fields of ‘Grey Wethers’, random stones left like flocks of grey sheep on Fyfield Down and elsewhere.  ——————— Yale University Press is delighted to offer a promo code for £10 off* the Pevsner architectural guide to Wiltshire by Julian Orbach, when ordering directly from the publisher. Order via the website www.yalebooks.co.uk/pevsner and enter code Y2196 when prompted at checkout to redeem the discount. RRP £45.00 | DISCOUNT PRICE £35.00 *UK orders only, free P&P, code valid until 31/12/2021 ABOVE: Christ Church, Shaw, 1905, CE Ponting transformed an earlier church built by Thomas Henry Wyatt in 1836. BELOW: Buildings of England: Wiltshire , the county that Nikolaus Pevsner knew best and where he kept his own cottage for many years (All images with kind permission of Yale University Press) I felt the presence of Pevsner, with whom I had worked in the 1970s, at the grave at Clyffe Pypard and near his cottage beneath the white horse at Broad Town and on the top of that escarpment looking out over the vale’