Travels with Pevsner - Yorkshire with Jane Street Porter. 22 Mar 1997

compiling a 46 volume guide to every building he thought was of interest from Stonehenge to Centrepointe what happened to that Tower that upper part is sitting at an angle on the bottom hareton as guides regularly updated our unique nothing quite like them exist anywhere else in the world well lava Barrow it might that dog in this series six contemporary travelers take to the road with pevsner's buildings of england as their guide [Music] [Music] [Music] the North Riding of Yorkshire is a wonderful country as work on the buildings of England proceeds such counties are getting ever L when I have done Cumberland and Westmorland the best of England will be finished the best that is as far as nature is concerned but also for architecture water continuities with its Abbey's and castles its eighteenth-century houses and its small towns and villages welcome to north yorkshire the part of England that I've made my second home I first read peasant as buildings of England as a young architectural student in the London of the swinging 60s who'd have thought that 30 years later I find myself in complete agreement with him about the North Riding of Yorkshire quite simply there's nowhere else like it in the whole of Britain [Music] [Applause] the north riding as Nikolaus Pevsner nuit has long since been redrawn and renamed as simply North Yorkshire I've been coming here to go walking for over 20 years in 1986 I completed the 200-mile coast-to-coast walk which took me right across the county from Kirkby Stephen in the West to Robin Hood's Bay in the East North Yorkshire is a huge County and although it's sparsely populated as pets are discovered it has a wealth of fascinating buildings to explore from the dales and Moors to the North Sea coast [Music] skaara the earliest mentions of scarborough refer to 966 and 1066 medicinal Springs were discovered about 1620 and were visited by people of good fashion sea-bathing got going about 1730 nowadays it is of course the sea rather than the spa that attracts visitors [Music] one of the really great things about North Yorkshire is its coastline and it's seaside resorts Scarborough is far more exciting than anything the South's got to offer surrounded by soaring cliffs and with wide sandy beaches the way the town straddles its geography is much more exciting than dreary Eastbourne or prim and proper Worthing holidaymakers have been coming to Scarborough for well over 200 years but its heyday is in the 1950s three million people used to come here each year whatever you think of Scarborough's charms today there's no ignoring the town's largest and most famous building the Grand Hotel completed in 1867 at the bottom end of the valley the wondrous Grand Hotel a high Victorian gesture of a session and confidence of denial of frivolity and insistence on substance than which none more telling can be found in the land the materials are yellow and red brick from the beach the building rises to 13 stories it dominates the front bullying everything else into submission a monument to the exciting possibilities of Victorian tourism the hotel cost sixty six thousand pounds to build the equivalent of two and a half million pounds today the architect Cuthbert Broderick had already designed plenty of monumental buildings from Leeds Town Hall two ambitious plans for the National Gallery and the bomb-bay Custom House over the years some impressive guests have signed in at the Grand Hotel among them Frederick Delius Gracie Fields and the Beatles when Posner came here in the 1960s the Grand Hotel had survived two world wars and the depression but it was no match for the package holiday and the lure of the Costa Brava not even this wonderful main staircase could compete with the charm of the concrete blocks of Torremolinos and Benidorm but in the fabulous era when the grind was at its prime guests could wander from the dining room to the drawing room out onto the terraces and back to the coffee room ending their evenings in the ballroom and all for the princely sum of fifty pounds a day full board [Music] in 1979 the grand became a Butlins hotel and some limited attempts have been made to recapture its glory days they say it's the biggest brick-built hotel in europe took over six million bricks to build it actually and it's called a calendar hotel the four domes are the four seasons and there's twelve floors free one for each month there were 52 chimneys which you've only just recently some of them had just been knocked down do they try to get 365 rolls they did I don't know whether they quite made it but with all the public rooms they probably did so what were the rooms like all drew well the bedrooms were very large and of course the bathrooms were huge too and they had the luxury of having four taps in a bath this was to enable them to have the hot and cold town water to bathe in but also so that they could have a seed water and this was piped in from the sea into the hotel and it was heated so they could have a hot sea mouth if they wished [Music] 20 miles north of Scarborough is Whitby from across the surrounding laws it lies out of sight clustered around the busy Harbor which be grew from a prosperous fishing town at the mouth of the river esk to an important whaling center in the 18th century even thousands of day-trippers can't lessen the charms of Whitby although I prefer to wander around on wet and windy winter days and I completely agree with Pevsner when he says that Whitby is one of the outstanding fishing towns in the country he finds it delightful for the busy at key sides with the long irregular rows of houses for the abbey which as a ruin is sublime as well as picturesque and for the parish church the like of which is not to be found anywhere in the country the parish church sant mary's stands high above the town on the east cliff and his best approached as personal suggests one should look at the church as part of the fishing and shipping town and reach it from below ie not by car but by the winding 199 steps this path was originally a wooden staircase built in the 14th century years later church wardens collected money to turn the wooden stairs into elegant stone steps and railings were added after a local artist was nearly blown away in a gale there it is then when the exertion is over in a splendid position low and spreading and battlemented a wonderful jumble of medieval and Georgian when one walks round it but when one enters it hard to believe and impossible not to love it is one of the churches one is fondest of in the whole of England at night this eccentric interior is simply lit by candles Desna gives thanks that it wasn't gutted during the Reformation one of the most striking things about that marries is this triple-decker pulpit in which the parish Clark gets the very bottom level the priest taking the survey sits in the middle level and whoever's doing the sermon gets the top deck the galleries in the box pews which make the interior so distinctive were added in the 17th and 18th centuries so that now the church can hold 1500 people as person a says the whole place is a happy confusion and the box pews positively invite games of hide-and-seek [Music] but for one family the Chumley's lords of the manor of Whitby a box pew wasn't good enough they wanted a seat where they could see and be seen the best one in the house so sometime between 1600 and 1625 they built their pew right across the chancel arch rather blasphemously says Pevsner it might stand on these elegant barley sugar columns but it obscures one of the finest norman archers in the country but what did the trombley's care they were on top of their world in the darkness of the Chancellery there's an inscription that I particularly like it's on a stone commemorating Peregrine Lascelles who died in 1772 at the age of 88 a man of truth and principle in short an honest man as Posner notes the parish churches in North Yorkshire are not generally among England's best there's nothing here to compare with Norfolk or Gloucestershire where the ecclesiastical architecture rises to great achievements is in Abbey's and priories Whitby is without doubt one of the most moving ruins in England on its bare windswept Hill fully exposed to the east the weathering of the sandstone helps to enforce the peculiar ruin qualities and enough stands to take in architecture and cloudscape at once there are 20 monastic ruins in the north riding including such famous sites as Revo servo and violent but my favorite is on a hillside near osmotherly sadly now by the ugly a 19 fount Grace Priory Mount Grace is the best-preserved charter house in England it was founded by Thomas of Holland Duke of Surrey in 1398 and is thus the last but one of seven charter houses erected between 1343 and 1414 in the Middle Ages just 15 monks lived in individual cells around this giant cloister and in great luxury by the standards of the day each cell or house was like a private monastery and it's rather than a church was the focus of everyday life one cell was reconstructed early this century and gives some idea of how a Carthusian month might have lived in the Middle Ages by the front door is a hatch through which food was passed to the monks who spent their time alone under a vow of silence praying meditating and eating their meals not me they were vegetarians lay brothers performed all the menial tasks that might distract the monks from their religious duties each monk had his own house of two stories with living room study and bedroom and a garden at the back what hardships silence imposed this amount of space must have compensated any monk space to oneself was a very rare comfort in the Middle Ages and the monks had the ultimate private space to themselves an individual lavatory flushed with running water channeled from a nearby spring throughout the Priory there is evidence of a really sophisticated plumbing system one of the most attractive things about being a monk was that until the arrival of Henry the eighth's you are relatively safe from intruders and Marauders high up on the moors above mount Grace is the 20th century's guard against intruders and Marauders filing Dale's early warning system this truncated sandcastle was put up in 1993 and replaced a less sophisticated version known locally as the golf balls three perfect white globes of great size on three perfect black prints in the grandiose undulating silence of the moor the geometry of the space age as its most alluring and most frightening they are called rather embarrassingly ray domes well give me the golf balls any day even if they were called ray domes this monstrosity should have been topped off to make a perfect pyramid then we'd have a National Monument something to be proud of a worthy rival to Stonehenge but perhaps the Ministry of Defence was worried that if they did make a pyramid it would attract hordes of New Age travelers to worship it I'm sure a peasant would agree with me that what this moorland horizon needs is a pyramid keeping out unwelcome visitors has always been an important part of life in North Yorkshire the landscape is dotted with the ruins of castles bolson castle guarded Wensley Dale and Mary Queen of Scots was held here before her imprisonment and execution Midland castle was the home of the young Richard the third and here he came under the influence of Warwick the kingmaker and Richmond Castle dominated Swale Dale from its position high above the river but it's not just cast elation on castles in North Yorkshire Swinton Park was built in the early 17th century a hundred years later a huge round tower was added and everything castellated the bridge over the river you are at middlin was built in 1829 it was originally a suspension bridge and what better to crown the supporting towers than battlements this miniature castle keep in B Dale is in fact a leech house built 200 years ago the river provided a source of fresh water to keep the blood sucking beasts alive ready to be collected for medicinal uses an English leeches home really was his castle and behind these mock fortifications is North York shares grandest house and greatest folly Castle Howard the early 18th century is a climax the mansions which were built are as grand as any in the country and they have moreover a distinct North Country character the series begins with Castle Howard designed by Sir John Vanbrugh in 1699 and executed with the help of and no doubt modified by Nicholas Hawksmoor the house was one of the largest in England at the time when it was planned today the approach from the south for the thousands of visitors who come to Castle Howard each year is along the five-mile Avenue through the Carmyle gate car Meyer gate the style is gargantuan bedrock which blends well with the castellated war and the bastion towers it's up and down and up again towards the pyramid gate the pyramid gate has excessively heavy piers a big arch and a crowning pyramid Vanbrugh was as fond of pyramids as he was of medieval Isaac detail carry on up to the obelisk the obelisk 100 feet high and commemorating the building of the house and the making of the plantations the obelisk was raised in 1714 a sharp right turn at the obelisk and a long sideways approach to the house itself all very interesting but little sense of arriving at an architectural masterpiece 250 years ago things were very different let's arrive at Castle Howard again [Music] in the 18th century visitors to the house would have come along this track before they got to the avenue and there ahead of them carefully framed in a gateway was the vast estate this was known as the exclamation gate because quite simply people would dismount from their horses look at the view and go Wow [Music] Castle Howard was built for the third Earl of Carlyle who is more than keen to impress the court of William and Mary where he held high offices the old shows us his architect John Vanbrugh a fellow member of London's fashionable Kit Kat club but Barbara was a playwright and had no architectural training it was rather like asking Harold Pinter to design the Millennium Ferris wheel Bamburgh wisely chose to work with him the self-effacing Nicholas Hawksmoor who knew everything about building who then designed Castle Howard van breh or Hawkes ma the question is worth asking as the building is amazing in its baroque style enormous in size and quite novel in almost every respect did Barbara design most of the house or did Hawkes War I like to think that at she Hawksmoor had a bigger hand in it the most will say I certainly feel he must have had a big in hand in it because of the actual structure itself after all boundary built nothing at all as we well know and all he done his written players and been imprisoned in the Bastille and a soldier of fortune so I do feel that Hawksmoor had a great deal to do with the actual structure as for the decoration the flamboyance of theatricality of it I think that's very much for ambra the Great Hall is an immense room more palatial than any seen up to that time in any palace or country house in England it reaches up through the two storeys and into the dome high and wide arches open into staircases a gloriously baroque effect these are again handled with a monumentality uncommon in England in the east war is a gigantic fireplace with lively quite gay and festive decoration this Great Hall at Castle Howard is a staggering piece of architectural design but sadly a lot of what we see today is not the original in the 1940s when the building was being used as a girls school fire broke out and destroyed much of the South East Wing and it reached the Great Hall itself the dome was completely destroyed and four years castle Howard was a sad sight restoration began in 1960 using a set of country life photographs from the 1920s the exact dimensions of the dome were calculated by the science of photogrammetry a mixture of photography and trigonometry and the top was put back on Castle Howard some of the original paintings inside the dome by the Italian Pellegrini survived including as a reminder of the tragedy this one of a woman with her urn of flames representing the element fire but others were repainted again using old photographs as references well before the house was completed it seems that both the Earl and Barbara were distracted from the building by the potential for having fun landscaping the grounds to me the whole place resembles an 18th century theme park they designed this pavilion the temple of the four winds charming rather than grandiose says Pevsner then a bridge was built over the artificial New River I particularly like the stark pyramid built by the third Earl in memory of his ancestor William Howard the founder of the Howard family but without doubt the greatest building in the grounds of Castle Howard is the mausoleum the mausoleum is certainly the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor as it was built after Van Burrus death but poor Hawksmoor was given a hard time he was mortified when fellow architects criticized him for placing the 20 giant columns too closely together and not in accordance with the classical world sense of proportion and order and to pour more salt into Hawkes Moore's wound Pevsner agrees although he does offer a defense it adds just that virility which distinguishes this rotunda from conventional ones in other people's gardens and big gardens certainly do need big rotunda's the mausoleum is a hundred feet high taller than Castle Howard itself it is enormous in size and extremely noble in design and of majestic simplicity in size and cost it compares with a wrench earch in the City of London in the crypt below like the bones of generations of the Howard family starting with a third Earl of Carlyle who died in 1738 unless the North Riding the triumph of Castle Howard as his memorial [Music] architectural gems come in all shapes and sizes from while the 18th century produced the baroque splendor of Castle Howard it was also responsible for this little piece of perfection ever stand Hall it's now rather like a once famous fifties film star a bit rundown and flaky but totally appealing Ariston Hall was designed in 1718 and obviously for a very sexy woman the house was created for the mistress of the MP for Scarborough and she was hard to please there was a village in front of the house that was cleared away so that she'd have a better view but sadly it seems the house didn't live up to her requirements and amazingly she never moved in [Music] [Music] every day will be a lovely story if I always see you waiting for me so everybody I am ever stonehall is a Mediterranean villa a fantasy plopped on the edge of the windswept North Yorkshire Moors it would have been far more at home in Umbria or Tuscany the MP William Thompson had his initials carved into the stonework and around the house the various clues to the architect Colin Campbell's theme a shell of fish head stalactite saan the front columns [Music] originally this whole area was a huge water garden that went right up to the house the water came from a spring higher up the valley and was even channeled around the house to make a series of cascades and fountains on the other side William Thompson certainly went to great lengths to try and please his mistress according to Posner Everton Hall is a song a pavilion rather than a house and its principal interest is that it shows Campbell in a far from Palladian mood no severe classicism here Campbell himself described the house as a small rustic edifice but I like to think he created a divine folly to celebrate a grand love affair but sadly even the best architects can't account for the path of true love [Music] [Laughter] throughout the 18th century designing and building houses was all the rage with the upper classes in North Yorkshire the North Country had already a Jordan van brassieres at castle heard some remarkable amateur architects Vande remained their existence in the letter of 1721 there are several gentlemen in these parts of the world that are possessed with the spirit of building Duncan Park near the market town of Helmsley is the work of one of those men possessed with a spirit of building William Wakefield it's thought that van breh who is working on Castle Howard at about the same time may well have influenced the design the house was built for Sir Charles Duncan who'd made a huge fortune in banking but it was his descendants who set about establishing the Duncans as one of the great families of North Yorkshire and they turned their attention to the grounds rather than the house [Music] what singles out Duncan Park among all the estates of the north riding is its grounds they represent one of the most extensive and boldest landscaping enterprises in England on the duncum Terrace are two temples of about 1730 the ionic temple at its North End ascribed to van breh at its South End the Tuscan temple with a domed room inside the present Lord feversham is a descendant of the Duncans he used to write for motorboat and yachting magazine but now he's the Admiral of Duncan Park little febrile person and wax is lyrical about the grounds do you think he's got it right yes I think he probably has I mean the house was gutted by far in the middle of the last century and so is the restoration job really whereas the garden is pretty original it's a very early garden I suppose starting about 1715 of this type it's I suppose the principles on which it's built are our classical principles and if you look at it it's laid out as though by Pythagoras with the giants geometry set it's all curves and straight lines now what was the purpose of the temples where they just put at either end of these broad walks to just create vistas well it's like punctuation centres yeah if the garden is taken as a sort of sentence or a paragraph these are commas and full stops I mean they're rarely saying stop here and look out of the view because the whole purpose of this garden is to accentuate the beauties of the landscape the sort of idea of rustic paradise Arcadia silence and peace and quiet and celebration of nature they wanted to look at on a sort of perfect landscape a hundred years after the Duncan Terrace was laid out another North Yorkshire landowner decided to make his own perfect landscape dotted about these woods are prehistoric standing stones well a Victorian version up ahead is one of my favorite buildings in the county [Applause] a copy of Stonehenge says Pevsner but I think it's much better than the real thing for a start you can get up close and you can actually touch the stones this mock temple was built by William Danby and was more than just a plaything Danby paid unemployed local men a shilling a day to build his folly a sort of private youth employment scheme there's a story that the local landowner offered an annuity and food to anyone who could live in the temple in total silence for seven years he had to let your beard and hair grow freely apparently the best that anyone could manage was four and a half years Richmond is one of the visually most enjoyable small towns of the north of England well I don't agree with Pevsner to me Richmond's main square is ruined by traffic and there are some really ugly shop fronts but the town does possess an architectural jewel even if it is a small one the humble Richmond Theatre Royal a building of 1788 once again a theater now the theater was built for an actor manager Samuel Butler whose company toured North York share with their productions but a decline in popularity forced the theater to closed down in 1848 and for a hundred years the building was used to store wine grain and during the last war wastepaper it was restored in the 1960s to the original design and color scheme it is one of the best preserved Georgian theaters in England the proscenium especially is nearly perfect ground floor boxes and on Tuscan columns upper boxes going to the theater in the 18th century could be a pretty rowdy occasion in this theater the gentry sat in the boxes the middle class sat in the stalls and the rabble were up here in the balcony actually the balcony was closed for a while because of the immoral goings-on and if you were up here you could throw stuff on the people sitting down below and you could register your approval and disapproval of what was going on on the stage with this kicking board [Applause] [Applause] pets new wrote his guide to the north riding in 1966 and it doesn't include many post-war buildings but I like to think that football fan or not he would have included the brand new home of Middlesbrough football club the Riverside Stadium it holds 30,000 supporters and rises up majestically alongside the cranes and ships in the docks a terrific addition to the Middlesbrough industrial skyline [Applause] until the early years of the 19th century Middlesboro was no more than a few cottages along the river tease a town was laid out on a grid system in 1830 and the port and iron ore works made Middlesbrough a major industrial center in Victorian England throughout peasant as trapples he's very keen on perambulations round places of architectural interest well to us lesser mortals that simply means taking a stroll in Middlesbrough he started his perambulation in the Old Market Square but that was 30 years ago and times have changed Market Square Old Town Hall 1846 simple attractive Italianate front rendered the groups of three small arched windows on the ground-floor are typically early Victorian the tower behind the building proper intended as a beacon for Middlesbrough former national provincial Bank 1871 one storied and Cinquecento a rich design with columns and knowledgeably done the RC Cathedral 1872 red brick no tower [Music] pevsner's perambulation took him under the albert railway bridge in soo commercial Middlesbrough but generally he found little else of interest the big tarnish appearance goes only skin-deep and outside the center hardly anything calls for perambulating Pevsner may have been rather dismissive of Middlesbrough but like any visitor he couldn't fail to be impressed by the town's most distinctive landmark the transporter bridge over the river tees the bridge was opened by Prince Arthur Duke of Connaught the third son of Queen Victoria on the 17th of October 1911 the one major monument of Middlesbrough a European monument one is tempted to say without any doubt the most impressive building in Middlesbrough 850 feet long and 225 feet high and in its daring and finesse a thrill to see from anywhere [Music] I'm going to end my travels with Pevsner with a spot of cheating this part of up until Adele wasn't in the north riding but it is firmly within the boundaries of North Yorkshire a couple of miles up the road are the anger room and scar House reservoirs and mysteriously peasant who doesn't make any mention of them in any of his books about the county of Yorkshire remote they certainly are and feats of engineering rather than pure architecture but for me they're one of the wonders of the county if not the whole country [Music] the reservoirs were built to supply water via tunnels and an aqueduct to Bradford 30 miles away to the south the scarf house damn is over a third of a mile long and a million tons of local stone and concrete were used in the construction a whole village was built to house the men working on the reservoirs and their families at one time 1200 people lived on this bleak hillside with more traveling in by train each day to my mind these ruins are as much a reminder of North Yorkshire as glorious past as are the a breeze and castles when this reservoir was completed in the 1930s it was the largest stone structure in Europe with its towers and it's cast alation scar house reservoir represents a stirring achievement and a magnificent monument to the thousands of workers who toiled for over a decade and a half to build it James hoar came here to work as a tunnel ax we're in the late 20s and we walked up from loft house because we came around that corner and saw the war which is about a third up and all the smoke and the steam as the locals and the cranes pottering about Allah we were thoroughly amazed it was a real eye-opener it was a complete village in every way amazingly so when you realize that the history of public works such as this were a history of shanty towns and bad conditions and what about the bunk houses where 50 men lived together to share your attic sitting in one there were ten of these dormitory hooks should call hostels each at 64 cubicles in and so you had 640 men down this little plateau as the reservoir neared completion and you saw that instead of just being a plain reservoir it was gonna have all these towers and everything else I mean what did all the lights think they were work you know it of the design as well they all thought and I'm speaking now for the mercenary families I knew of them they all thought well here we are we've been putting big stones one on top one another this is a great opportunity to show what we can do and this is how that came about and this castle a did to us and things like that was a display of their craft no question about that well it's wonderful yes when we have our reunions we look around I'm sorry to say there's very few of us left at work there we always say when we're leaving it will never be another scar yeah and then never be another place like scar [Music] for a special booklet on littlest pet owner and English architectural styles please send a check for four pounds 99 to travels with Pevsner p.o box 7 London w5 - GQ [Music]

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Length: 48min 55sec (2935 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 19 2019