A History of Yorkshire: County of the Broad Acres
This book is magnificent (there is no other word for it), fitting both in scale and quality its subject. Ranging from the Stone Age to the 1990s, it is no mean feat to have captured in 140,000 words the essential history of a county that comprises almost one-eighth of England. David Hey, however, rises to the challenge with a bravura performance that sets a new standard for popular county and regional histories. The book is also visually ravishing. Hey's text is graced by around 500 carefully chosen illustrations, many of them high-definition colour photographs specially taken for the volume by Alistair Hodge. Among a wide range of other pictorial sources, the Yorkshire Archaeological Society provides a number of evocative nineteenth-century photographs of buildings and streetscapes. David Hey makes no apology for the fact that his view of the county's history differs from almost all others because he comes from south-west Yorkshire, 'perhaps the least fashionable part of the county' he disarmingly observes. Potentially a weakness, this is actually turned into a great strength. It is easy to be overawed by the physical and historical grandeur - in their different ways - of the West Yorkshire textile towns, the North Yorkshire Moors, the Dales and York itself. Without in any way marginalising these essential elements, David Hey crafts a shrewd conspectus that conveys a lively sense of the continuities and changes across all three Ridings. As one would expect of a distinguished historian of the Sheffield region, due deference is given to the steel city and its environs; but Hey is alive to the rich history of a striking array of towns that for many (even, dare one say it, from Yorkshire) are often little more than names (for example, Conisbrough, Doncaster, Hornsea, Howden, Pocklington, Rotherham and Selby). Telling textual and pictorial reference is also made throughout to a host of smaller urban and rural communities. Has the book weaknesses? Those interested in the areas of Yorkshire furthest flung from Sheffield may feel cheated. Holderness, and the losing battle of its coastal communities with erosion by the North Sea, is well-covered; but the upland communities of the far west (consigned to the indignity of Lancaster postal addresses) are not. The text is also thinner when it reaches Cleveland, and Alistair Hodge's motorbike seems to have petered out completely once it arrived in Whitby. Middlesbrough is here (albeit unillustrated and with its elevation to a parliamentary borough and Lady Bell's pioneering social investigation of the town misdated), but the iron industry along the rest of the Yorkshire bank of the Tees is ignored; so too are the ironstone mines and communities of East Cleveland, the region's earlier alum industry (save for a glancing reference), and the potash mining that - on a titanic scale - still endures there. These are curious hiatuses in a book that is notably alive to industrial archaeology. But it would be travesty to end a review of this sumptuous book by cavilling. It presents the fruits of a lifetime's work by one of Yorkshire's finest historians, one who has always observed W. G. Hoskins's dictum that stout walking boots should be among the historian's most-valued tools. --Malcolm Chase, Local Historian