Visiting Rye with Pevsner

 

It’s always a pleasure to look at towns with Pevsner (The Buildings of England) in hand. For this trip, I used the original edition of Sussex, dating back to 1965. Today, of course, the series has greatly expanded and the feel of Pevsner has been greatly diluted. I don’t have the latest volume of Sussex for comparison, but I would guess that the text is at least 50% longer, and the text coverage much more comprehensive. But it is not only that the later editions have more text. As Pevsner explains in the Foreword, he only did East Sussex, while Ian Nairn wrote West Sussex, which enables the reader to compare the two approaches. In an interesting comment, Pevsner writes: “Mr Nairn has a greater sensibility to landscape and townscapes than I have, and he writes better than I could ever hope to write. On the other hand, those who want something a little more cataloguey and are fervently interested in mouldings and such-like details, may find my descriptions more to their liking.”

 

Well, Pevsner covers the Rye in around 1,400 words (three and a half pages). This is amazingly concise. The perambulation of the town omits many buildings that in the later edition would certainly have a mention, not just the more recent buildings. Most intriguing is where Pevsner pauses, to see the workings of his mind when he spots something that interests him. Generally, Rye is covered with simple brief mentions, although he notices the widespread Rye checkerboard pattern of red and black bricks. He only really pays attention to three buildings in the whole town, apart from the church: the Town Hall, the old Grammar School, and the Old Hospital.

While for the most part he records dates and styles of buildings, no doubt following the working notes prepared from him by his dutiful, but not necessarily inspired, assistants in advance of the perambulation, for these three buildings he seems to come to life. It is certainly dating and detail that fascinates him.

The Old Grammar School

For the Old Grammar School, he is intrigued by the use of brick for giant pilasters and Dutch gables. He immediately runs through a checklist of early uses of each motif, and satisfies himself that here they are “remarkably early”. For the church, as usual, the focus is on dating as well. The transepts are “still essentially Norman”. In the South transept (sorry, S transept) “slightly post-Norman (dogtooth) bits have been reset.” It feels almost as if he was too frightened to relax from his academic dates and styles focus to let go and respond to the surroundings – for pretty much everything else in Rye, we get just the  date and a few words about notable features.

You cannot help feeling that the essence of  Rye hasn’t been captured. Rye, which was full of visitors on the Friday and Saturday we visited, is one of the great exemplars of a rural English town; but you feel somehow that Pevsner would never have lived there; not enough issues of dating and precedence to engage him fully. 

In contrast, Pevsner shows almost no interest in Lamb House, one of the largest buildings in the town (“clearly of the early C18 with its panelled parapet and its angle pilaster strips”). Of course, even if the building is unmemorable, the situation is astonishing. The view from the living room facing the church is right along West Street; you could not hope to have a more central location in the old town. You can’t help feeling this must have had an effect on Henry James’ writing. Why otherwise seek out this obscure rural location and live there for 19 years? 

Pevsner’s introduction is sketchy and raises as many questions as it answers: “The E part of the town has largely disappeared, owing to the action of the sea”, yet the town “started to diminish in the second half of the C16, when the harbour silted up”. For him, the two themes of Rye are the brick, already mentioned, and “the open view to the plain”. Actually, for a hill town, there is not much of a view to the plain. There will be a view from most of the private gardens facing S or W, but the only large-scale public view in Rye is to the E. For example, I was not able to make out Camber Castle, about a mile to the W, when looking from the old town.

In contrast, Nairn is highly aware of the surroundings, whether positive (“Up Waltham … a wonderful group in a download valley … from the S, church, farm and barns look like a monogram in flint”) or negative: “Southwick … A bit of everything and not quite anything … The genus loci seems to have gone on strike, or to have been locked out.” As the man himself states, Pevsner feels his primary role is to establish those dates: which giant order of pilasters came first, Rye, Kew, or Blickling? And I have to say, I’m not really that bothered. I'd be more interested to know what Rye represents to all those day trippers.