Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Interesting facts
- When it opened in 1977, YSP was the first sculpture park in the United Kingdom, inspired by temporary open-air sculpture shows held in London parks from the 1940s.
- In 2014 it won the Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year, worth £100,000, announced at the National Gallery in London.
- James Turrell spotted the 18th-century deer shelter while staying on the estate in 1993, but his Skyspace inside it was only realised in 2006.
- Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, the park's two cornerstone artists, were both born nearby, Moore in Castleford and Hepworth in Wakefield.
- Rather than a fixed display, the park runs a changing programme of mostly single-artist exhibitions, earning it the nickname 'gallery without walls'.
- King Henry VIII spent three nights in the earlier hall on the Bretton estate, and panelling from his room was later moved to Temple Newsam in Leeds.
- The parkland was laid out by Richard Woods in the 18th century and reshaped by head gardener Robert Marnock, who dammed the River Dearne into two lakes.
- Fragmented by decades of college use, the historic landscape was declared 'at risk' by English Heritage in 2009 before YSP took on its restoration.
- Bretton Hall housed a college of education from 1949 to 2001 and then a University of Leeds campus until 2007.
Why it is worth it
Yorkshire Sculpture Park was founded in 1977 by the arts administrator Peter Murray, and it has become one of the finest places anywhere to see modern sculpture under an open sky. It occupies about 500 acres of the eighteenth-century landscape of Bretton Hall in West Bretton, near Wakefield — rolling pasture, woods and an old deer park, which in the twentieth century became the grounds of a college of education. The pleasure of the place is the conversation between art and land: a bronze reads differently against a winter hedge than it does at the crest of a hill in June.
Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth anchor the collection, and their large bronzes sit comfortably in the open landscape. Around them works by Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi, Phillip King, Kenneth Armitage, Nigel Hall and many others appear across the hillsides, alongside pieces by Andy Goldsworthy, Yinka Shonibare and Ursula von Rydingsvard, whose "Damski Czepek" of 2015 is cast in polyurethane resin. James Turrell turned the old deer shelter into one of his light installations, a quiet chamber where the sky itself becomes the work.
The estate's older buildings have been given new lives. St Bartholomew's Chapel, built in 1744 by William Wentworth and listed Grade II*, now shows art; the Underground Gallery is set into the hillside of the old Bothy garden; the Longside Gallery, run with the Arts Council Collection, faces back across the park. The Weston, the visitor centre that opened in 2019, was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize. The eighteenth-century ice house and camellia house survive among the trees.
Getting there
The park lies at West Bretton, about 4 km from Darton and roughly 7 miles from Wakefield; Leeds Bradford Airport (LBA) is about 29 km away. The nearest mainline station is Wakefield Westgate: bus 108 runs from Westgate and bus 96 from Wakefield Kirkgate, both stopping at the park. By car, leave the M1 at Junction 38, take the A637 and follow the brown signs for about a mile.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is an art gallery, with both open-air and indoor exhibition spaces, in West Bretton, Wakefield, in West Yorkshire, England. It shows work by British and international artists, including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. The sculpture park occupies the 500-acre (200-hectare) parkland of Bretton Hall.
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