As assembled and annotated here, Pevsner's Townscape: On Visual Planning and the Picturesque comprises three parts. The first part analyzes English planning tradition before 1800. The second surveys English planning theory or, by Pevsner's lights, the theory of the picturesque. The third part is essentially a meditation on how this tradition and this theory shaped architecture and urban planning in England in the nineteenth century and, potentially, the twentieth as well. The work as a whole is a surprisingly fresh plea for a visual approach to urban design and common sense in architecture, one that sought to incorporate and mediate, rather than idealize and exclude.