Jane Grenville's revision of Yorkshire: the North Riding, which began in 2016, is approaching completion. Here she talks about the man and his methods and the pleasures of following in his footsteps in what he called 'a wonderful county'.
Pevsner undertook fieldwork for the North Riding in July and August 1963 amidst storms and ‘then hot summer, with the air filled with camomile, jasmine and lime’, according to his wife Lola, driver as always, writing afterwards to a friend about the joyousness of that summer together. Pevsner loved the North Riding: the buildings, the scenery, the people (it is the volume that is famously dedicated to ‘those publicans and hoteliers…who provide me with a table … to scribble on’). Revising the volume has been an extraordinary privilege, getting to know the man, understanding his enthusiasms, his dislikes, and, by working out his routes, his curious omissions. Inevitably in such a rural county, much of what I see is just what Pevsner saw, but there are also pockets of major change in the industrial north of the county. And what a vast county it is: it takes me two hours to reach the furthest corner from York. With two national parks, a fine selection of castles, abbeys, parish churches (no cathedrals…) and country houses it has been a feast of material at the polite end. But also the industrial, the seaside, the vernacular, the military and the archaeology all give it an extra edge of endless interest. This lecture will cover Pevsner’s background and that of the Buildings of England series before going on to give a (necessarily selective) account of the work of the past five years.
Jane Grenville's early career was as a digging archaeologist. Early on, she encountered Harold Taylor (Anglo-Saxon Architecture) and developed an interest in the application of stratigraphic techniques to the study of standing buildings. This led to a diversion into architectural history and conservation, with a stint on the 1980s Re-Survey of Listed Buildings in N Yorkshire, followed by a few years as casework officer for the Council for British Archaeology. In 1991 she embarked on an academic career in the Archaeology Department at the University of York, where she developed the MA in the Archaeology of Buildings and for several years led the MA in Conservation Studies, inherited from the Institute of Advance Architectural Studies (and still going strong, contrary to continuing disinformation!). She then spent seven years in senior management, retiring as Deputy Vice-Chancellor in 2015. In retirement she has returned to her listing patch to revise Pevsner's North Riding volume - unequivocally the best job so far in a generally fortunate career.