Books

Yorkshire gold MARTIN VANDER WEYER

Yorkshire: The North Riding

By Jane Grenville and Nikolaus Pevsner

Yale University Press £45

‘The North Riding of Yorkshire was abolished on April Fools’ Day 1974’ is the emphatic opening to this revised edition of the original 1966 Pevsner volume.

But the fools who redrew England’s administrative map half a century ago count for naught in Pevsner-land, where the ancient northern division of God’s Own County still runs, in the present tense, from the Derwent to the Tees.

And what joy to find everything that made the North Riding – landscape, history and religion as well as buildings – captured in this beautiful book, as resolutely retro in design as it is in its choice of boundaries.

Leipzig-born Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83) came to England before the Second World War and created his multi-volume series The Buildings of England between 1951 and 1974. His North Riding fieldwork was completed in five weeks in the summer of 1963; his wife, Lola, did the driving (but died soon afterwards) and the result was dedicated to ‘those publicans and hoteliers … who provided me with a table in my bedroom to scribble on’.

Jane Grenville, an archaeologist and former university administrator, took six pandemic-disrupted years to repeat the exercise. And what a remarkable job she has done, respectful of Pevsner’s voice, judgement and scholarship while interjecting her own on post-1966 additions and changes.

Here, for example, is the convent of Stanbrook Abbey at Wass – designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley in 2015 to become

‘the major architectural contribution of the early C21 to the North Riding’. The effect of light through its tall windows casting diagonals across rough-plastered white walls is ‘mesmerising’.

In contrast, the 1988 postmodern Central Building of nearby Ampleforth College by Ellis Williams – squeezed between Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s abbey church and the older school – is ‘astonishingly discourteous towards its distinguished neighbours’.

Likewise, Grenville casts a discerning eye over the indulgences of the wealthy. The two-faced Hartforth Home Farm near Scotch Corner is one that earns praise and a pair of photos in the handsome plate section. Built in 2009 for a local baronet (by Digby Harris, from an idea by Yorkshire’s leading postwar Georgian revivalist, Francis Johnson), it presents a classical villa on one side and a decorative Gothick front on the other.

Not so successful is the neoclassical Ravenswick Hall at Kirkbymoorside (Adam Architects, 2021; commissioned, though Grenville doesn’t say so, by a Teesside industrialist), ‘a vast palace … remarkable only for its scale’.

Not that there’s snobbery in Pevsner’s and Grenville’s work. They record irregular village greens and the county’s typical wide verges in front of humble cottages; market towns are as well described as stately piles; no hamlet church omitted.

In that last category, I enjoyed the entry on St Aidan’s, Carlton (near my own hometown of Helmsley), by Temple Moore, 1885-6. ‘On the way to the moor, it afforded Pevsner a sense of physical and spiritual shelter; now it provides holiday accommodation.’

It does so thanks to the addition, by Leeds Environmental Design Associates in 2012, of a rectangular extension clad in pre-weathered zinc which local folk thought looked like a dumped shipping container – but, for more kindly Grenville, it ‘successfully presents a clear break between old and new’.

There’s kindness also in her inclusion of jobbing architects such as my late friend Tony Burns – a modernist hardly ever allowed by planners to build as he would have wished – commended here for ‘an excellent contemporary intervention, mindful of [local] building traditions’ in the Esk Moors Lodge care home – and a ‘thoughtful’ extension to Helmsley Arts Centre, of which I happen to be a trustee. How proud he would have been to find himself in Pevsner.

Can I find fault with Grenville’s work? Well, I’m obliged to point out that Helmsley’s parish church is All Saints (formerly St Matthew’s), not Holy Trinity.

And I can’t help feeling that a full survey of today’s ‘buildings of England’ ought to take in the new housing estates – the works of Barratt and Persimmon – that have attached themselves to every town and commutable village. It seems insufficient, for example, to say of Strensall that it has a nice war memorial and has ‘grown into a satellite suburb of York’. Perhaps Grenville should have explored its sprawling closes and byways in search of something worthy of comment.

But overall this is a magisterial work of reference, a joy to browse and a handsome artefact in itself. Yale University Press deserve a medal for perpetuating the Pevsner project. The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art deserves another for supporting them.