Yorkshire: England’s sculptural heartland in the north

I am standing on the deserted shop floor of a Victorian mill in Wakefield, with the industrial history of Yorkshire spread out before me like a map. Down below, the River Calder, once so busy, is now a leisurely, peaceful place. Children play beside the water. There are fishermen on the banks. It’s a lot prettier than it used to be. It’s also a lot less businesslike. But among these redundant warehouses, a strange renaissance is taking place. This derelict mill reopened last month — not as a factory but as a new annex of the Hepworth, a museum that has welcomed nearly a million visitors in its first two years. Incongruously Yorkshire, a county built on hard graft, is becoming increasingly renowned as a centre of the sculptural arts. The director of the Hepworth, Simon Wallis, shows me around this restored mill, now renamed the Calder Gallery. ‘There were piles of bird excrement — literally mountains of it!’ he says. ‘I don’t think anybody had been in here for about 30 years.’ When Wallis opened the Hepworth, in 2011, he hoped to attract 150,000 visitors per annum. In fact, three times as many turned up, boosting the local economy by £10 million, and making David Chipperfield’s bold new building one of the most popular galleries in Britain. With hindsight, the popularity of the Hepworth should have come as no surprise. Here in Yorkshire, sculpture was already part of the scenery. The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds is a research institution of worldwide renown. Yorkshire Sculpture Park draws well over 300,000 visitors every year. So is it just a coincidence that Britain’s greatest sculptors, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, were both born here in Wakefield? Or is there something about Yorkshire that makes great sculpture happen here?

Travelling around West Yorkshire, I’m reminded that this is a supremely sculptural county.