The Buildings of England series was begun in 1945 by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, with its forty-six original volumes published between 1951 and 1974.
The Buildings of Ireland series was begun in 1979 and remains incomplete, with six of a planned eleven volumes published.
To rectify this shortcoming, when he was invited to suggest ideas for future publications by Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, he proposed a series of comprehensive architectural guides to the English counties.
Lane employed two part-time assistants, both German refugee art historians, who prepared notes for Pevsner from published sources.
Each contains an extensive introduction to the architectural history and styles of the area, followed by a town-by-town – and in the case of larger settlements, street-by-street – account of individual buildings.
[2] They largely continue to use the historic boundaries, but have been partially updated to reflect changes in London, Birmingham and the Black Country, and Cumbria.
Since 1962, the guides have undergone a gradual programme of updating to reflect architectural-history scholarship and to include significant new buildings.
Nikolaus Pevsner was enthusiastic about establishing a Scottish series, having responded warmly to an unrealised 1959 suggestion by the architectural historian Andor Gomme that the latter could produce it.
A major contributor to the Scottish series is John Gifford, who before his death in 2013 authored five volumes and oversaw research on all but one of the remainder.
[3] After Lothian, which was the only volume published in the original small format, a major task was producing Edinburgh (1984) and Glasgow (1990), which were ambitious in their scope of coverage of urban buildings.
[4] The series is organised using a mixture of Scotland's current council areas (e.g. Highland and Islands) and its historic shires (e.g. Fife and Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire).
A number of factors accounted for this, including the readiness of parts of the text covering certain areas and the anticipated size of the volumes.
Unpublished titles included: In 1995 Penguin, in conjunction with English Heritage, released a publication based on the guides entitled Looking at Buildings.
Focusing on the East Riding of Yorkshire volume, Pevsner's text was adapted as an introduction, with a greater number of illustrations than the main guides.
No further print publications were issued, but the title survives as an introductory website to architectural terms and selected buildings which feature in the Pevsner guides.
In 2016, Yale University Press published three volumes, each serving as an introduction to some of the buildings and the architectural terms mentioned in the text of the guides.
In 1986, Penguin published an anthology from Pevsner's volumes edited by Bridget Cherry and John Newman, The Best Buildings of England, ISBN 0-670-81283-8.
Both series were accompanied by booklets published by the BBC, describing the buildings featured in the programmes and suggesting others to explore.