Foss-side buildings in 1990. I don’t know what these businesses were, but the buildings are long gone.
Where they once stood, it’s now mainly open space, still awaiting redevelopment. The new apartments built in recent years are to the back of this view, close to the line of trees.
The Hungate area buildings in the picture will have been a collection of small workshops and industries, bed makers and printers are two I remember being there. But they are all now demolished in favour of development and the new Hungate Residential Quarter. Only the chimney to the City Incinerator still remains on the skyline though that was under threat only saved by a preservation order.
Memories of Hungate are often blighted by the fact that, before clearances in the 1930’s. it was an area of poverty and dereliction. But it was not always so.
Prior to the intense development by speculative builders of tenements in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s Hungate was an area of grand houses owned by wealthy merchants who had their warehouses and wharfs on the riverside of the Foss. Some Lord Mayors lived in elegant houses in this area and entertained their Civic guests here before the Mansion House was built.
There was also the Shoemakers Hall (the guild hall of the Company of Cordwainers) on this site – demolished in the early 1800’s in favour of building tenements.
Prior to the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, a Carmelite Friary was located on just this site, adjacent to Foss Bridge and Fossgate, which is still remembered by Carmelite Street and some ancient stones still existing on a lane behind the present Fossgate shops.