The first professor of Art History at Birkbeck and the most influential architectural historian of the twentieth century, Nikolaus Pevsner was a fervent believer in the value of teaching art and architectural history as full university subjects rather than adjuncts to other disciplines.

Pevsner was a prodigious writer, editor, broadcaster, and chairman of numerous organisations including the Victorian Society, but he is most famous for his 46 volumes of Buildings of England.

He had come to the UK after the Nazis dismissed him from his lectureship at the University of Göttingen. During World War II, he joined other refugees in helping local authorities to clean up the mess after the bombing. Pevsner was then employed in protecting Birkbeck’s Breams Building in Chancery Lane from fire during the night. As he wrote in a letter, “I have received promotion and am now fire-spotter at Birkbeck College. It is by no means the kind of return to academic surroundings that one would fancy, but it is a decided improvement”.