A lot of the books I review on this blog come from public libraries or from charity shops. That inevitably means a lot of them are at least a few years old, though most are rather newer than I had expected. This one, however, is extremely old, and it was lent to me by a family friend from his collection.

Yorkshire Vales and Wolds was printed in 1908. While I have read older works (e.g. by Shakespeare and Dickens) the particular copies I had were very much modern reprints. This was a first edition, with its original hardback cover (the spine of which sadly fell off while I was reading it) and liver-spotted pages. On the first blank page there are names written in for at least two former owners (it was apparently gifted by a Gordon Leech on 29th August 1912) and what looks like a resale price of £15 from an unknown date. The cover itself is a work of some beauty, having bright gold lettering against a royal blue background, the title flanked by two York roses and the bottom edge displaying the municipal heraldic shields of York, Sheffield, Hull and Leeds. Initially it may look quite imposing to the unfamiliar reader, with 33mm between the covers, but the page count of 181 (before the index) means it’s actually a lot shorter than most of the other books I’ve read recently. The illusion of bulk comes from much thicker paper for the pages (no doubt part of why it’s lasted so long) and slightly larger font and margins for the main text. Even if the word count had been as high or as dense as my other books, that would have posed no challenge: Despite its highly detailed and technical subject matter, the prose flows with a smoothness that embarrasses many more modern works and one never feels tired or stuck when reading through it.

Gordon Cochrane Home was a prolific writer between the years 1904 and 1936, mainly writing travel guides for different parts of Britain (especially Yorkshire), which detailed the built and natural environments for the benefit of visitors. Born in 1878, he lived to 1969, which means rather remarkably that this book from Edwardian times will remain under copyright in Britain (though not the United States) until 2040. Home was also a watercolour artist, and the book includes many of his own beautiful colour illustrations of the areas he visited.

Despite being written nearly a century before my birth, Home’s descriptions of the landscapes and architecture (particularly churches) along the Humber still feel familiar. He can also, at times, be rather catty. This, for example, is his description of Withernsea:

For the modern town we feel pity more than indignation. It consists of a haphazard collection of ugly lodging-houses, a modern church and a conspicuous lighthouse, whose revolving light glares into the windows of half the houses in the town, making sleep impossible. The place seems consciously at war with the ocean, and gazes ruefully at the remains of its iron pier, a limb that was savagely handled by the sea some years ago. No doubt the frail sea-wall will crumble away before long, and the depressing houses will then follow rapidly.

At least one part of that has changed – Withernsea lighthouse has not been illuminated since 1st July 1976.

Despite this being ostensibly a travel guide, Home clearly disapproves of the modern idea of tourism, especially from the lower classes:

Years ago Filey obtained a reputation for being “quiet”, and the sense conveyed by those who disliked the place was that of dullness and primness. This fortunate chance has protected the little town from the vulgarizing influences of the unlettered hordes let loose upon the coast in summer-time, and we find a sea-front without the flimsy and meretricious buildings of the popular resorts.

Although his travels were more than a century ago, Home finds many of the buildings he encounters, particularly the churches, are already in a decayed, damaged, or abandoned state due to events as far back as the Civil War or the Reformation, whose events he recounts in tones often approaching despair. He also frequently complains that industrialisation has left many formerly-beautiful buildings ruined by smoke and soot.

It would be an interesting exercise, nowadays, to recreate Home’s tour (in much the way that Portillo recreate’s Bradshaw’s) in order to see how many of these locations are still the same as he encountered them. I expect most would show little change, though decades after deindustrialisation at least some of the old buildings would hopefully have been cleaned up a bit.