Peter brears biography

Peter Brears is former Director of the Leeds City Museums and one of England's foremost authorities on domestic artifacts and historical kitchens and cooking technology.
Peter Brears was director of both York and Leeds' City Museums, is a consultant to the National Trust, English Heritage, the Historic Royal Palaces.
Writer and museums consultant, Peter Brears, is one of the country's leading authorities on domestic life in the past, as well as a talented artist and expert.

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Historic house consultant and food historian

Peter Brears was born and educated in Yorkshire. He was Keeper of Folk Life for Hampshire County Museums and Director of York Castle and Leeds City Museums for 20 years. His books include All the King’s Cooks (1999) and The Compleat Housekeeper (2000).

For centuries the food cooked in our country houses was the finest available, its variety greatly expanded by Victorian investment in new technology and professional cooks who were employed in the country houses. Adventurous, international trade in the Victorian period also meant that new ingredients became available. This great culinary tradition began its decline around the time of the First World War, and collapsed with the outbreak of war in 1939. Now, over eighty years later, it remains forgotten, as even those who experienced its final stages have passed away. Hopefully Peter Brears’ book will go a long way in reviving interest in it, and encouraging further appreciation and enjoyment of all its diverse aspects.

In the 1970s, Peter Brears restored the 1680 kitchen

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Peter Brears was director of both York and Leeds’ City Museums, is a consultant to the National Trust, English Heritage, the Historic Royal Palaces, the winner of numerous prizes including the André Simon award for his book, Cooking and Dining in Medieval England, the standard text on the subject, and Britain’s leading authority on jelly. Peter Brears was born in Thorpe, between Leeds and Wakefield, in 1944. Aged five he moved to the pit village of Outwood where his mother stayed at home and cooked good, plain wholesome food for the family and his father ran the pit-head baths. A scholarship to Castleford Technical High School then Leeds College of Art taught him engineering, product design, and technical drawing. As a boy with an inquiring mind and a love of history he volunteered to work in local museums and on the Sandal Castle archeological dig. He attended extra-mural classes and for fun, hung out with the local smallholder-cum-scrap merchant, a Steptoe figure, with Brears acting as Steptoe’s son, collecting what had become by the 1960s, unwanted mahogany furniture, chaise lo

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Peter Brears

With their draped suits, suede creepers and immaculately greased hair, the Teddy Boys defined a new era for a generation of teenagers raised on a diet of drab clothes, Blitz playgrounds and tinned dinners.

#TeddyBoys by Max Décharné is out now in paperback!

From the Edwardian origins of their fashion to the tabloid fears of delinquency, drunkenness and disorder, the story of the Teds throws a fascinating light on a British society that was still reeling from the Second World War. In the 1950s, working-class teenagers found a way of asserting themselves in how they dressed, spoke and socialised on the street. When people saw Teds, they stepped aside.

Musician and author Max Décharné traces the rise of the Teds and the shockwave they sent through post-war Britain, from the rise of rock ‘n’ roll to the Notting Hill race riots. Full of fascinating insight, deftly sketching the milieu of Elvis Presley and Derek Bentley, Billy Fury and Oswald Mosley, Teddy Boys is the story of Britain’s first youth counterculture.

#nonfiction #historybooks #maxdecharne

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