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Fifty years on, the definitive guide to West Riding architecture is recreated
It has taken Peter Leach 15 years to create a new version of the celebrated Pevsner's guide to the buildings of West Yorkshire. Watch his guided tour exclusively here.
PETER Leach has been treading in large footprints. He has spent every spare moment for 15 years recreating, updating and adding to an architectural journey first undertaken 50 years ago by one of the giants in the field.
He has inspected the mouldings, ornaments, roof forms and rustication of thousands of buildings across the northern part of the West Riding, including proud civic buildings, Victorian warehouses and mills, tight-knit Pennine villages and the beauties and curiosities of opulent country mansions, stately homes, monasteries and churches.
He has trodden the same paths as Nikolaus Pevsner, the world- renowned art and architectural historian who came to England from Germany in the 1930s and first created a series of 46 county-by-county guides to English architecture – a painstaking and unique catalogue of our rich building history.
Whereas Pevsner was based in London and used a team of research assistants to amass information before he set out with a driver to do his own exploration of a particular area, Leach has done more or less everything himself for his new edition of Yorkshire West Riding – Leeds, Bradford and the North.
It's an advantage that he lives near Skipton, and since retiring from his job as an art history lecturer he has devoted himself full-time to finalising the 800-odd pages of this sumptuous guide book. He long ago lost count of the number of buildings listed within it.
Updating and revising what is viewed by many almost as a sacred work and making your own mark on it must be an interesting and slightly nerve-racking challenge. Leach, a distinguished architectural writer in his own right and a former inspector of ancient monuments and historic buildings, says his approach has been rather different to Pevsner's.
"He didn't have much to do with local antiquities organisations, whereas I'm the opposite and had a lot of contact with local historians. I think that what started him off was that he came to this country and felt that the English were not really aware of the richness of their architectural heritage. He wanted to help them to value what they had. An awful lot more people are interested in architecture now than were back then."
For anyone who truly is interested in the explanation of buildings and how they fit into a local, national and international context, then the Yorkshire West Riding guide is an amazingly rich and educational document. It encompasses a geological rundown of the northern half of the Riding, architectural history, explanations of the development of communities in the area, individual buildings and monuments of interest and a glossary of architectural terms.
As with the original, Leach has included "perambulations" or little tours that take in various places of architectural merit within an area.
The West Riding guide uses historical boundaries, and because of the sheer number of architectural treasures in this huge area, the Riding has been split into two separate areas encompassed by two guides – the part covering the southern area will be published at a later date and is being compiled by a different historian. The North Riding, South Riding and East Riding also remain to be updated.
The need for two separate books has been created by the fact that, as well as the material which was in the original guides, the area has seen an explosion in new building of all kinds since Pevsner's first edition.
Leach's new version of Yorkshire West Riding includes a much wider array of building types than the original. "I've kept to the spirit of his work, but architectural history has moved on since the 1950s.
"His approach was art historical, but there is also a lot to be said about how buildings were designed to work so, for instance, I had put in a lot more about the plans for 17th Century buildings of the Pennines. I've also put in a great deal about industrial buildings and included more than he did about local architects."
In between working full-time as a university lecturer, Pevsner turned out his guides at a rate of around one a year, producing 32 himself, ten as collaborations and handing over four to others to write.
"I tried to follow the same method as he did, seeing as much as possible myself, both inside and out. I did enjoy it, but it's quite a relief that it's done. And I have to say that, the more you do, the more you admire Pevsner. I'm not embarking on anything else just now..."
Of the thousands of buildings included in the book, which categories can be said to be most characteristic of the West Riding?
"Millstone grit Pennine farmhouses and townhouses. They're very distinctive and high quality. Also the architecture of the textile industry, with the worsted mills of Bradford being different to the cotton mills of Lancashire."
The book deals in facts rather than opinion, but which of the more modern buildings listed in it does he consider to be of particular distinction?
"There's a very modern medical centre at Idle near Bradford that is bold and inventive, giving a great lift to an ordinary non-descript area. I also like the wonderfully elegant Utopia Pavilion at Broughton Hall near Skipton, which is a hearteningly exciting piece of architecture reinventing some old outhouses."
Leach says there's a tendency in some circles to see good architecture as a thing of the past, not a notion connected to the present.
"There's so much going on in the architecture of any era, and each time has its good and bad. Looking to the past what we see surviving is the good stuff. Generally, the bad buildings have been knocked down long ago, so we get a distorted view that everything was good."
n The Buildings of England – Yorkshire West Riding, Leeds, Bradford and the North by Peter Leach and Nikolaus Pevsner is published by Yale University Press, 29.99 and is available at Salts Mill Bookshop, Salts Mill, Saltaire.
Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983)
The son of a Jewish merchant, Pevsner was born in Leipzig and studied art history at the Universities of Leipzig, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt/Main before working at the Dresden Gallery and teaching at the University of Gttingen (1929–33). He had to leave his post in May 1933 after the Nazis banned Jews from employment. He moved to England and the University of Birmingham. In the early 1940s, he became a professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and was later visiting lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. He assumed British citizenship in 1946.
Pevsner found that the study of architectural history had little status in academia and the information available was limited. He began work in 1945 on a series of 46 county guides, which were published by Allen Lane between 1951 and 1974.
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