Putting Man on the map

UNTIL the publication of Jonathan Kewley’s book, my scant knowledge about the ancient kingdom of Man amounted to the deathly TT motorcycle races, Manx cats without tails, Baillie Scott’s inventive Arts-and-Crafts houses and Sir John Betjeman’s elegiac essay, when he went ‘tramping kneedeep in blaeberry bushes on the wild west coast’, was exhilarated by the narrow-gauge railways and transfixed by the Tynwald Day celebrations.

- Kate Green

Pevsner’s Isle of Man Jonathan Kewley (Yale, £45)

Now, Dr Kewley has transported me there in a rarity for Yale’s ‘Pevsner Architectural Guides’: a ‘Pevsner’ without any input from the great man.

Although recent guides have been revisions of his originals, Pevsner never got round to Man before completing the English series in 1974. As a result, Dr Kewley, albeit tied to the usual gazetteer format, is free to find his own distinctive voice without the ‘Herr Professor-Doktor’ breathing down his neck.

The author believes the Island ‘has long had a chip on its shoulder that it has little architecture of interest’ and he rectifies this with a host of excitements, not least the discovery, from a 10thcentury inscription in Norse runes on a cross at Andreas, of the earliest artist in any Pevsner volume. This records the sculptor Gautr, who carved there in the Borre style of interlaced ribbons and ring chains, which was later the inspiration for Archibald Knox’s Art Nouveau pewter and silverware designs for Liberty’s.