The Buildings of Tudor and Stuart Wakefield by Peter Brears documents the ever changing landscape of Wakefield as history gave way to modernisation.
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”.
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.
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