Yale £29.95 pp864

You can measure out your life in Pevsners. The last of the six London revisions of the unrivalled Buildings of England series, as started back in the 1940s by architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner and carried on by his acolytes, has finally been published. How long have I waited for this moment? I take down the first of the modern large-format series on the capital. That was London 2: South. It was published in 1983. We had to wait until 1997 before we got London 1: The City of London. And before volume 5 came volume 6 (Westminster) in 2003.

Confused? Actually it’s more complicated than that, if you go back into the earlier history of the London Pevsners. But here’s the point: the London series was originally published in the 1950s as a three-volume set of Penguin paperbacks — one dealing with Middlesex, long since absorbed into Greater London. Typically, Pevsner himself published volume 2 — known as “London Except”, because it was central London except the City and Westminster — first, in 1952. So confusion is as old as the series itself.

Today the volumes have grown so much bigger and more numerous that it takes no fewer than 4,865 pages to cover the capital. The typeface is small and dense. Each volume weighs about a kilo. The complete stack is 10in high. You get the picture. It is a very long time since these wonderful architectural guides were the sort of book you could stuff into your pocket as you strolled around town.

And the series as a whole remains wonderful — though I have reservations about this last volume. Like Ordnance Survey maps, these books are unique to Britain, the best and most comprehensive of their kind in the world. Out in the shires, their authority is unrivalled. But can they capture squirming London? Just think of the changes to have hit East London since the researchers last came this way. The entire Docklands phenomenon, for a start. You cannot imagine Pevsner, surveying the bomb-damaged East End in the aftermath of war, imagining a Canary Wharf. “Very little in Poplar, besides the churches and public buildings, deserves notice, very little of interest remains in Limehouse,” he sniffed in “London Except”. But he did feel that rebuilding was the answer. And boy, did he get it.

Pevsner died in 1983. London 5 seeks out and finds merits in the East End that he was blind to. Spitalfields Market, for instance, he dismissed in 1952 in a couple of lines (“of no distinction”). Of course the market became a huge conservation battle at the turn of the 21st century and has now been half demolished to make way for offices. London 5 devotes a lot of space to Spitalfields Market and finds some distinction in it. Never mind that the part that has been demolished is the later bit that Pevsner most disliked. “The baleful effects of this [the demolition and subsequent arrival of Norman Foster-designed offices] cannot be over-emphasised, and marks the continued, and doubtless irresistible, empire building of the City of London in place of the social and domestic needs of the East End,” say today’s authors. “The cherished contrast in scale between high-rise west of the City boundary and the intimate domesticity of Spitalfields is lost for ever.” Pevsner, in 1952, had no high-rise to make a contrast with, cherished or otherwise.

Which brings us to Canary Wharf. Tall, certainly. Also now a cluster of towers rather than a single campanile with lower buildings. Good or bad? Hard to tell. Today’s authors seem to have abandoned the barbed aside in favour of mounds of inconclusive verbiage. The Isle of Dogs alone gets 40 pages, but you find no clear opinion (in 1952, Pevsner covered the whole of Poplar, more than twice the area, in just seven and a half pithy pages). Today, individual buildings are bloodlessly described. The whole is characterised as “A Manhattan waterscape of commercial offices towering over the sparse relics of the old docks”, which is true to the point of banality.

So there I was disappointed, and I am almost never disappointed in The Buildings of England. In parts of this book, today’s Pevsnerians seem overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all. Some of the spirit is missing. Next time: a touch less detail, please, and a touch more cavalier disdain. Because while the Buildings of England books were always meant to be objective, their great appeal was that they never really were.

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