Perpendicular England
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 1955
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith lecturer is Dr Nikolaus Pevsner, the German-born British scholar of history of art and architecture, and author of the county guide series, The Buildings of England (1951–74). In this series, Pevsner explores the qualities of art which he regards as particularly English, as illustrated in the works of several English artists, and what they say about the English national character.
In his fourth lecture, Dr Pevsner examines the Perpendicular style, formed in England in about 1330, and which he calls 'the most English creation in architecture'. It represented a complete break with what had gone before, but once it had been established universally in the country by the 1380s, it remained virtually unchanged for 150 years, so much so that even specialists struggle to determine accurate dates for this style of work.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.8 | This lecture in the series The Englishness of English Art, given by Nicholas Pevsner, was originally broadcast in 1955. |
| 0:15.5 | We present the fourth in the series of BBC wreath lectures on the Englishness of English art, |
| 0:23.2 | given by Dr. Nicholas Pezner. |
| 0:26.1 | He calls this lecture perpendicular England. |
| 0:32.4 | If you go into one of the big English parish churches of the late Middle Ages, |
| 0:42.3 | the age of Henry V, Henry the 6th, Henry the 7th, what will you find? |
| 0:44.3 | I'll take as my example in Newark in Nottinghamshire, |
| 0:49.3 | a tall nave, thin, sinewy, |
| 0:53.3 | very emphatically perpendicular piers, large aisle windows, large |
| 0:59.1 | upper windows, their tracery hard and impressively, if monotonously, repetitive. |
| 1:07.6 | A timber roof of low pitch, not a vault. |
| 1:16.7 | The chancel and the transepts long angular and square ended not with rounded ends or rounded or polygonal chapels vast end windows in the |
| 1:24.6 | chancel and the transepts, running up to immediately below the roof. |
| 1:29.9 | It makes the east parts of the church a veritable glasshouse, clear, light, and not a bit mysterious. |
| 1:39.3 | And it must always have been like that, for figured glass at that time was confined to selected areas. |
| 1:47.2 | There was plenty of white, that is, of transparent glass. |
| 1:52.4 | Now, what qualities stand out from this description, which would be much the same if we took |
| 1:58.7 | others of the great English perpendicular parish churches |
| 2:01.9 | Lavanham or Longmelford or Blytheborough in Suffolk or Chipping Camden or Sirenceston in Gloucestershire |
| 2:09.4 | or King's Lynn or Walpole St Peter in Norfolk. Large size, simple plan, flat chancel end, general angularity, hard separation of parts, |
| 2:23.3 | repetitiveness, boldness of the very large openings, and in the end, a generally rational, |
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