Taking the capital apart

Think of the West End, and you think of ephemera. You think of shops, bars, clubs, films, shows, traffic and the fast-changing theatres of window displays and clothes. You might then think of the fixed monuments, like Westminster Abbey and Nelson's Column. You might, less clearly, have some sense of the facades of buildings above street level, and their Victorian and Edwardian detail. This order of priorities makes the picture of the city that modern tourist guides describe.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's vision was different. In his Buildings of England series of guidebooks he approached places as if they were Florence or Venice, to be described in terms of their churches, major buildings and public statues. In this huge 30-year project he set out to describe every architectural detail on every building of note in England.

He was a dissector and anatomiser, who sought to sort every element by date and style. There is a species of ant named after Pevsner, conferred by an entomologist who knew him as a boy, and, as the art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich said, the collecting, industrious spirit of the ant entered his soul.

In relation to country houses and rural parish churches, Pevsner's approach works well. Applied to London it creates an invaluable catalogue of architecture, but creates a curiously skewed picture of the city, one filtered through strangely selective vision.

Statues and churches are among the most marginal objects in most Londoners' daily lives, but here they are pre-eminent. It is possible to lead a full and rich life in London without ever noticing the funerary monuments in Westminster Abbey, but here they take up page after page of photographs.

You see your city as a stranger might, full of unfamiliar and enigmatic objects.

Pevsner died 20 years ago, but his books live on, continuously expanded and updated. London, which he originally covered in two books, now takes six, much fatter volumes.

London 6: Westminster is the latest of these. The expander and updater for this volume is Simon Bradley, whose name appears ahead of Pevsner's in the author's credit.

Bradley does make a point of including restaurants and shops of architectural note. The Groucho Club makes an appearance alongside those funerary monuments, and Wagamama and the French Pub ("dull only architecturally").

He also expresses tastes that would make the arch-modernist Pevsner wince. Thirty years ago, the latter wrote that "the neo-Georgian or neoclassical spectre is even now not yet laid"; now Bradley can find something to like about the new and emphatically neoclassical Queen's Gallery.

Yet Bradley is faithful to Pevsner's dry, precise, occasionally barbed style. He has recast some of Pevsner's descriptions, to achieve an almost unchanged effect. The book is a remarkably consistent joint creation by two men on either side of the coffin lid.