PUTTING PAST ON RECORD
The groundwork for historian Peter Brears’ latest book began five decades ago, when he documented the changing face of Wakefield as a teen. Laura Reid reports.
It was thought the best thing to do if you wanted to have a really good economy was to put in lots of new shops and buildings. What was new and exciting in the 60s now looks decidedly second rate.
Historian Peter Brears, who has published a book on Tudor and Stuart Buildings.
WITH AN inquiring mind and a love of history, a teenage Peter Brears captured the face of a changing Wakefield. It was the late 1950s and the area’s timber-framed buildings, often richly decorated with elaborate carvings, were being swept away in the name of modernisation.
“Wakefield had decided that it needed to improve and redevelop its city centre,” Brears recalls. “There was also a feeling that everything new was good and everything old was bad. Wakefield lost a lot of its best Georgian architecture and Tudor buildings were also coming down because at that time, these weren’t appreciated as much as they are now.
“It was thought the best thing to do if you wanted to have a really good economy was to put in lots of good, new shops and buildings. The problem is that, as in many towns, really good buildings were taken down and it was a very bad time for putting up (new ones). What was new and exciting in the 60s now looks decidedly second rate. That was happening all over.”
Living in Outwood at the time, but attending school in Castleford, Brears, now 75, noted the changing landscape as he made his way home through Wakefield after a day in the classroom.
He began recording buildings as they were being demolished, making detailed drawings of what they looked like and where they stood. A volunteer with Wakefield Museum at the time, he also flagged up with staff any carvings and materials he thought were worthy of preservation and several were saved within its stores and collections.
“I was coming through Wakefield virtually every early evening after school,” says Brears. “I started doing drawings of things as they were coming down.” It was a case, he says, of “if I didn’t do it, nobody else would”.
“There used to be a house just south of Wakefield called Chevet Hall and I can remember that coming down. Underneath there was a complete medieval great hall. One of the beams from it was rescued and it’s one of the biggest pieces of oak I’ve ever seen. It’s about 2ft square and over 20ft long.”
Established historian Brears kept the notebooks of his sketches for five decades, hoping one day to revisit them. A few years ago, he finally got the chance and earlier this year, he officially launched his latest book
The Buildings of Tudor and Stuart Wakefield.
It’s a culmination of painstaking work, both as an adolescent and in recent adulthood. Through his own meticulously detailed drawings and paintings, Brears reconstructs Wakefield’s lost buildings, informed by his early sketches, as well as architectural drawings and the materials of the day that have been kept in stores in the city’s museums.
Having researched the buildings in the context of Wakefield’s history and development, Brears accompanies these with a scholarly text discussing the area’s architectural heritage.
“I think most people will find an element of surprise because certainly if you’ve only known Wakefield this past 30 or 40 years, most of the buildings I detail are all gone,” he says.
“The book includes drawings and reconstructions of all the different buildings that used to be there, measured drawings of all the woodwork and the plasterwork of the buildings of the period, and also birdseye views of what Wakefield looked like at that date. It really does bring to life what the whole of Wakefield was like during that time.”
The buildings, Brears says, are evidence of Wakefield’s importance as a merchant trading community from the late medieval period into the 17th century. “In the 16th century and early 17th century, Wakefield became the regional centre of the woollen trade,” Brears explains. “As a result it developed half timber and stone inns, shops, houses and warehouses of the finest design and craftsmanship. I hope this book will give pleasure and knowledge and persuade readers that the best of the past is superior in its human qualities than anything they put in its place.”
Brears’s fascination with history stems from his childhood. His first five years were spent living with his parents – his father ran the pithead baths at Wakefield’s Oakenshaw colliery – and grandparents at a house in Thorpe. Even after he moved with his mother and father to his childhood home in
Outwood, a time he looks back on fondly, recalling cricket games in the streets and making go-carts out of old pram wheels, he remained close to his grandparents.
“I spent a tremendous amount of time with them. It was in the days before televisions and in the evening, you’d turn the lights off to save electricity. You’d sit around the fire and you talked. I was brought up with stories about my grandfather’s grandfather etcetera so I just picked up this awareness of the past and of people and ways of doing things.”
By the age of eight, Brears, who now lives in Headingley, would take history books out of the public library. By 13, he was volunteering at Wakefield Museum and, after education at Whitwood Technical College, he obtained a degree in engineering product design at Leeds College of Art.
His first job was Keeper of Folk Life for Hampshire County Council, but it wasn’t long before he was back in Yorkshire, with a brief spell at Shibden Hall in Halifax.
He then became live-in curator at Clarke Hall, Wakefield, turning the Grade II*-Listed 17th century building into a living history museum where, from the 1970s until its closure in 2012, schoolchildren could learn about the domestic life of their ancestors.
Brears moved on just as it opened, spending four years as director of York’s Castle Museum before taking up post as the director of Leeds Museums, where he stayed for 15 years. Since 1994, he’s worked on a freelance basis as an archaeologist, historic building specialist and food historian.
It’s been a long and varied career that has seen him work with English Heritage and National Trust at museums and great houses across the country as well as specialising in the study of domestic life, and carrying out research, restoration and interpretation projects for properties including Hampton Court Palace and Harewood House.
He’s also written around 200 publications, many of them, such as Traditional Food in Yorkshire and The Country House Kitchen, focusing on the history of mealtimes and delicacies.
As for whether there’s any sign of him slowing down, “Oh no,” he chuckles. “There’s obviously a need for this – I’m 75 now and people are still coming to me and asking me to do work for them.
“The alternative is the golf club, which is not my scene or watching telly, which is also not my scene. I think it’s just a natural curiosity that drives me.”
The Buildings of Tudor and Stuart Wakefield can be purchased via publications@ wakefieldhistoricalsociety.co.uk or from Wakefield Cathedral shop.