page_title: Barley Hall
section_title: Late 20th – 21st centuries
hierarchical_section_title: Barley Hall / History / Late 20th – 21st centuries
caption_attribution_description: English: The outside of Barley Hall, York
context_page_description: Barley Hall is a reconstructed medieval townhouse in the city of York, England. It was built around 1360 by the monks of Nostell Priory near Wakefield and extended in the 15th century. The property went into a slow decline and by the 20th century was sub-divided and in an increasingly poor physical condition. Bought by the York Archaeological Trust in 1987, it was renamed Barley Hall and heavily restored in a controversial project to form a museum. It is open to the public and hosts exhibitions.
context_section_description: By the early 1980s, the building was in a dangerously unsafe condition and was scheduled for demolition to make way for offices and apartments. As part of this process, however, the medieval architecture of the building was rediscovered in 1980; the site was sold for redevelopment in 1984 and then purchased by the York Archaeological Trust in 1987 when a further process of archaeological investigation began to inform a decision on the final use of the site.
  The decision on what to do with the building proved controversial. Its original wooden timbers had degraded significantly. Only 30% were still usable and the site had been extensively altered since the medieval period. The Trust decided to reconstruct the building as it might have appeared in 1483, with the intention of converting it into a museum, naming it Barley Hall after the Trust's chairman, Professor Maurice Barley. The post-medieval fabric of the building was largely destroyed and a new timber frame was built off-site and then moved into York over a ten-day period, a challenging operation due to the physical constraints of the immediate neighborhood. Replica furniture and fittings were created for the property, based on an inventory made in 1478. Supporters of the scheme, including English Heritage, viewed this as an attempt to produce an innovative way of presenting the past, similar to the Trust's work at the nearby Jorvik Viking Centre. The care and accuracy of the work was praised and the new museum received a generally positive public reaction.
  Critics of the reconstruction raised concerns over the nature of the preservation work. Academic Raphael Samuel noted that the restoration was heavily influenced by the late-20th century tradition of living history, in which "reinterpretation" gives way to "retrofitting", and where the past is "faked up to be more palatable than the here and now". The chairman of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings critiqued the work as producing a replica, rather than a restored building, condemned the destruction of the later periods of the hall and noted that it was "another contribution to our Disneyland heritage". Historian Sarah Beckwith suggests that York is now so heavily "museumized that very few of its features escape the construction of an imaginary and commodified past", a problem she argues is typified by Barley Hall.
caption: Barley Hall seen from the courtyard
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