Revising Pevsner: North Riding of Yorkshire, by Jane Greville (RECORDING)

This is a recording of a talk called Revising Pevsner: North Riding of Yorkshire, by Jane Greville which was recorded on 21st February 2023.

The Victorian Society and Yale University Press are pleased to introduce a series of online talks by authors of recent or imminent volumes from all four of the national series, plus the Isle of Man. Our fifth talk takes us to North Riding of Yorkshire.

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 pockets of major change in the industrial north of the county. And what a vast county it is: it takes 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 six 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 joined 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 (Historic Buildings). 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.

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