Steps by Lendal Bridge, 29 April 2013

This month I’ve posted something every day, an ‘April daily photo‘. I thought I’d summarise it all here, with a list, and a few thoughts below.

… Numbers 1, 2 and 3 started with details, buds on a tree, a coal hole cover, an old phone box.

Then details didn’t seem enough, and we shifted focus. So number 4 was a photo of the under-construction Peasholme Centre.

Number 5 was about geese, and how a Task Group is scrutinising them.

Number 6 shifted to a since obscured view of a former industrial building across one of those areas we call a ‘brownfield site’.

Number 7 looked from the outside at a building less widely accessible than it was, because of changes to its charges for entry.

Number 8 was an appreciation of daffodils in flower, which seems essential in April, on a piece of land we tend to think of as ‘common land’, but I’m not sure it is.

Number 9 took us to the gate of a place closed and private for decades, a building site now, for student accommodation.

Number 10 paused to appreciate another flower, on a piece of land rescued and enhanced, a former tip to a nature reserve.

Number 11 revisited a school building long since demolished, a landmark in its neighbourhood, nominated for the Local List.

12 drew our attention to a famous painted ad on a wall, and the changing streetscape around it.

13 visited a soon-to-be-demolished furniture warehouse, and a characterful detail round the back of the building.

14 went back to revisit 12, from a slightly different angle, confirming that a view of it has been lost, with a recent building intervening.

15 pictured a pub since demolished and replaced with housing.

16 visited a street corner where one photo prompted a lot of thought and brought many of this month’s general themes into one page, which ended up rather long as a result.

17 visited a large building site on brownfield land out in the suburbs, a residential development, but with no ‘affordable’ housing provision.

18 perused the newly-glazed colonnade at the theatre, which has claimed its space in full and no longer freely shelters shoppers at the bus stop.

19 appreciated an architectural detail reminding us of the importance of co-operation, on a building soon to be student accommodation.

20 took us out of town to a lane which has survived as a right of way, despite the land on either side being used for military purposes.

21 paused by a quiet corner of the Museum Gardens and thought about cultural change, and toilet provision.

22 considered the reuse of a building, a change of use, and why people who live nowhere near it feel so strongly about it.

23 looked at some lovely blossom and a tidy rose bed and reminded us not to take things for granted.

24 appreciated the beauty of a well-worn pathway between trees, and reminded us of the value and importance of rights of way.

25 looked at a 1960s office block, and plans to convert much of it to residential accommodation, as has happened with many other office blocks in the city.

26 was inspired by a plaque on a wall in the Museum Gardens, wondering if agreements being drawn up would safeguard our rights to visit it for free.

27 revisited the subject of the ‘problem geese’ and questioned whether they really are a problem, and how many residents see them that way.

28 touched on something else often seen as a problem in the city, the increase in licensed premises and extended opening hours.

29 took us back towards where we started the month, with an appreciation of a detail – layers left beneath, reminders of recent history.

30 took us to the heart of York, or one of its hearts, to a plaque on the Mansion House and the thoughts it provoked, as we move into May.

. . . . .

It ended up being a bit wider in scope, and a fair bit deeper in thought, than I originally intended. It was supposed to be a way of providing something new for visitors to the site to look at every day, but without being too time-consuming for me to do. But it ended up taking up a lot of time, and so a daily update probably isn’t sustainable.

However, I’m pleased with the overall result, and how it grew. And it ended up going in a certain direction because of a walk on the evening of 3 April, only a few days in. That wander into and through part of the city centre was the first I’d done for a while where I was in the right frame of mind for taking proper notice of my surroundings. And various thoughts I’ve been having for some months/years resurfaced in response to the things I was seeing, and they’ve emerged in the many words since, and affected the choice of the daily photo, and made me change some of the selection from images I’d planned to use when sketching out the project. (One of the ‘rejects’ is at the top of this page.)

So what have I wanted to focus on, in choosing these particular images my camera focused on …

That we shouldn’t take things for granted and assume we’ll always be able to access them, enjoy them. That sometimes the place can still surprise, particularly in April when flowers appear. That buildings have been demolished and new ones built, and that the new ones often intrude on views we once admired, and that perhaps we demolish less often now, and refurbish more, turning offices into homes, former chapels into supermarkets. That there’s a lot of student accommodation being built. That there’s a lack of residential accommodation for everyone else. That the city tilts towards the interests of the better-off, more and more. That less of it is accessible for free to the wanderer of its streets and potential peruser of its cultural institutions. That all these things tie in to things I’ve been writing about for years in different ways, because it’s all connected. And that I’ve been observing all this and all these changes for a long time, and that in my head it all links together and layers up and that when it does I tend to write a lot about it.

And that there are a lot of planning applications we need to visit or revisit, and geese we need to perhaps defend, so after a short break we’ll resume our efforts. But perhaps not post every single day. I’m having a flare-up of my repetitive strain injuries from typing so much, and my eyes are tired.

Thanks for comments added recently, and for the retweets and comments on Twitter too. Please join my mailing list if you’d like to be kept informed of recently added things via the weekly newsletter.

Lisa @YorkStories

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Plaque on the Mansion House, 30 April 2014

Let’s gather here, outside the Mansion House, near the entrance to the Guildhall, as we conclude this month-long experiment of a daily page based around an ‘April daily photo‘. The building is currently undergoing major renovation, so we can’t actually see this plaque at the moment, but as this is an imaginary gathering that probably doesn’t matter.

I took this photo of the plaque on the Mansion House on this day two years ago, after noticing its rather quaintly dated/somewhat sexist wording. It would be phrased differently now, with something a bit more inclusive and 21st century. ‘His or her’ or perhaps ‘their’. They’re expensive to make, these bronze plaques, so rather than replace it perhaps we could just write in ‘or her’ after the ‘his’, with Tippex.

Because, as I’m sure we’re all aware, Lord Mayors aren’t all male, we have female ones too. I suspect that anyone who wasn’t aware of that before will have become aware of it in recent months, as the current Lord Mayor has been rather more ‘high profile’ than her predecessors.

We’re about to launch into the jolly month of May, which sees not only Morris dancers dancing and cow parsley flowering but also the city’s ‘Mayor making’, when the city gets its new Lord Mayor for the year. This year it’s on 26 May, and will no doubt involve a procession similar to the one I wrote about some years back.

In 2012 it was a particularly giddy and delightful May-time, with accompanying (and even more uplifting) celebrations for York City Football Club. Standing in front of the Mansion House, as we’re imagining we’re doing, we might remember the jubilant scenes and singing around an open-top bus, parked up here outside the Mansion House after a victory parade through the streets.

No celebrations on that front this year.

The Lord Mayor and the football team are both seen to ‘represent’ the city, in their different ways. Though we’re seeing a change of Lord Mayor I don’t know if we’ll see a complete change of personnel in the football team, and don’t pretend to know enough about that subject to have an opinion on it. But I hope that the city will be represented well in the coming year by its football team and its Lord Mayor.

Best of luck to Dave Taylor, soon to be Lord Mayor, best of luck to York City FC, and let’s hope for a sunny day for the ‘Mayor making’.

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Aviva building, 2 Rougier St, reminders of old signage, April 2016

While on my way to look at Hudson House earlier this week I noticed this, the subject of today’s ‘April daily photo‘, from the vantage point of the city walls.

It’s a building I’ve written about before, a rather dominant presence at the end of Rougier Street. I took a few quick snapshots of it, noticing what we might call a ‘ghost sign’, revealed by the removal of its most recent signage for Aviva.

When I wrote about it before — inspired by a splendid hand-drawn illustration of it in a 1970s advertisement — I wasn’t sure what to call it. Because it seemed to have changed its name quite often, as the insurance company whose office it was changed its name, following various acquisitions and mergers. So I just called it ‘2 Rougier Street’.

But here, under its most recent plastic signage, it held ghostly reminders of a couple of those changes of name. Zooming in and doing a bit of digital enhancement reveals them:

2 Rougier St, detail: reminders of old signage, April 2016

‘Norwich Union’ is obvious. I thought I could also see a large ‘C’ to the right, and then remembered — wasn’t it CGU? — and some Googling revealed that it was (formed in 1998 from the merger of Commercial Union and General Accident).

When I’ve written about ‘ghost signs’ before it’s been in the sense of old adverts painted on brick walls, the fading kind, often hidden away behind newer advertising billboards, or still faintly visible. This is even more ‘ghostly’, though no paint has been involved here.

The signs, as I recall and as these reminders of them suggest, were plastic lettering. So what we’re seeing now must be the shadow left around them from the dirt accumulated back then.

This is a very congested, traffic-filled corner, with high levels of air pollution, something noted in the planning application documents for its conversion to residential.

These subtle sooty reminders of decades past made me think about how this office too was a major employer in the city, and when I think about the place now, having focused my attention, the name that comes to mind is ‘General Accident’, which must have been the name it had around the time I left school, when many people seemed to get jobs at General Accident.

No sign of that in the sooty shadows, but important to remember these things.

I guess they’ll clean up this important bar-walls-facing frontage, so I’m glad I captured this, if only on my compact camera in a quick passing snapshot.

Further information

‘Aviva’s history in York is really the history of Yorkshire Insurance’ says this fascinating article including many old photographs of York and advertisements from decades past.

There’s more information on heritage.aviva.com, on the Yorkshire Insurance Company Ltd (includes General Accident), and see also CGNU and Norwich Union.

A photo of the building in 2008 with the Norwich Union name

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Licensing application document in Micklegate window, reflecting The Priory pub opposite, April 2016

Today’s photo is of a licensing application document in a window on Micklegate. The window also reflects The Priory, a pub on the opposite side of the road, near the entrance to Priory Street.

When I started these pages site notices about planning applications seemed to be stuck up on lamp posts and the like everywhere I walked. There are still a lot of those around of course, but they seem to have been joined in recent years by an increasing number of documents relating to licensing applications, as more pubs, bars and restaurants open.

This one’s in the window of a large empty shop near the top of Micklegate, which is soon to be a Brewdog bar. I probably wouldn’t have given any thought to this, or stopped to take this photo, if it wasn’t for the recent Press coverage of a court battle over the licensing application.

Micklegate is an interesting street. Perhaps now a place where different ‘cultures’ are clashing. There’s clearly a movement to change the feel of the street, to promote it as a shopping street and community of businesses, like Fossgate perhaps. To me, and other people of my age and older, it has always had the word ‘run’ attached to it – as in ‘Micklegate run’, meaning it was a magnet for people out on a pub crawl who went down the street from one pub to another. Not something I’ve ever done myself. I remember tending to avoid it at ‘chucking out time’ (often accompanied by chucking-up time) on weekend evenings.

Back then, of course, we tended to be chucked out of the pubs not long after eleven. Drinking up time was announced with a shout from behind the bar and, as I recall, a bell ringing (or was that just some pubs). As I’m writing I’m suddenly recalling, almost hearing it again, the preceding ‘Last orders at the bar, ladies and gentlemen, please’.

But it’s different now, isn’t it. That 2003 Licensing Act referred to in the official notice on the window changed the rules on opening hours and made them more flexible. Apparently it came into effect in November 2005. So we’ve had just over a decade of this new relaxed ‘open all hours’ approach in our licensed premises.

So many things could be said. Perhaps this isn’t the place to attempt a lengthy discussion of what tends to be called ‘the drinking culture’. But I have to mention that I keep thinking of the Esher report, and its promotion of the idea that more people should be living in the city centre, within the walls, and how this has been encouraged, with many new apartment blocks and more people living in flats above shops. But we only need to read the observations of Pamela Ward in that report, where she describes the cultural life of the city, to realise that city centre living in the age of the 11pm ‘last orders’ would be a very different thing to city centre living now.

And in the Micklegate area … it’s hard to see that it will ever be a quiet kind of street, though there are obvious moves towards trying to make it more ‘gentrified’, like the rest of the city centre. But it’s still the main gateway in from the racecourse, the first street of pubs within the walls that the racegoers arrive in, coming up that ancient straightish road from the Knavesmire. And it’s near the station, and it has its reputation, and it has always had a lot of pubs, and that’s part of its identity.

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Greylag goose, Memorial Gardens, York, April 2016

Yes, geese again for today’s April daily photo. I think we’ve all heard by now that (as previously mentioned) there’s a Goose Management Scrutiny Review Task Group. Its report is on the agenda at a meeting tomorrow. I thought we could do some goose scrutinising of our own.  Let’s have a gander at this goose pictured above, and think about its many goose buddies.

The RSPB page on the Greylag goose says:

The ancestor of most domestic geese, the greylag is the largest and bulkiest of the wild geese native to the UK and Europe. In many parts of the UK it has been re-established by releasing birds in suitable areas, but the resulting flocks (often mixed with Canada geese) found around gravel pits, lakes and reservoirs all year round in southern Britain tend to be semi-tame and uninspiring.

‘Uninspiring?’ Our goose is offended. And I disagree. I think they’re very interesting, our geese, and even inspiring. I had an email back in autumn from a friend who had seen a skein of greylag geese flying in from the north, honking loudly over the riverside area in Clifton as they’d approached, landing on the Ouse, around 30 of them, honking and splashing.

This goose pictured above had rings on both its legs. I’ve noticed before that some of them are ringed. I know nothing about the subject of bird ringing, so perhaps anyone who does understand why this goose has two could add a comment.

This goose, like the earlier group pictured, was in the Memorial Gardens area close to the river Ouse. But as ten years has passed, I assume it’s a different goose. Although perhaps not. They can live a long time, apparently, so who knows, it may be one of those geese from 2006.

I have quite a few photos of it as it walked towards me, and I’d have liked to include them all, as actually I like geese, admire them often, and particularly the slow and gentle way they walk, carefully placing their big feet. This one approached me in its slow deliberate way, then turned its head away after while, perhaps because I wasn’t going to feed it anything, perhaps because it’s tired of being scrutinised.

Since mentioning the subject of ‘York’s problem geese’ (as the headlines tend to put it) earlier this month I’ve tried to read more information in the reports available, as this apparently pressing issue is on the agenda at the council’s Executive meeting tomorrow. There’s reams and reams of information, covering the perceived problems caused by the large populations of geese, ideas of how to manage this and reduce numbers, and information on how other places have tried to deal with their goose populations.

The fact that we now have a ‘Task Group’ with a long-winded title looking at the local geese has caused widespread amusement (and bemusement) and has meant that the subject has got more attention than it did before. But York’s geese have appeared occasionally in the headlines in past years.

The concern seems to be mainly centred around Rowntree Park. Not a place I visit much, as I’m over the other side of town. But is it really that bad? It’s a big park, surely there’s room for everyone, including geese?

I’d like to put the other side of things. My perception is completely different, as someone who walks through town often, along the riverside and near the riverside areas where the geese are apparently a ‘problem’. All I see is people observing the geese and enjoying them, taking photos of them, smiling at them, and particularly when there are obvious families of geese with goslings, as there are at the moment.

When I walked through Tower Gardens a few evenings back a group of adults, apparently a family group of different generations, were gathered around a family group of geese and goslings, with one taking a photo while they had a discussion about how lovely it was. No problem there then. And no problem anywhere else I’ve noticed the local humans interacting with the local geese. Twitter is full of photos people have taken of geese crossing roads and holding up traffic, and these photos are widely liked and shared, and make people smile.

According to the report (PDF) ‘Canada & Greylag Geese have adopted a residential strategy in York’. So they’re clever too.

My reading seems to have confirmed what I wondered on a page some time back, that the tatty-looking state of the flowerbeds in the Memorial Gardens may be due to the geese eating the plants. There’s an obvious solution to that: plant things they don’t like eating, perennials or shrubs perhaps instead of those expensive temporary bedding plants. Preferably bee-attracting plants.

And as regards the ‘droppings’ … again, in most areas by the river their (small) ‘droppings’ blend in to the natural environment rather more easily than the coffee cups, plastic bottles, cans, crisp packets etc, and occasional piles of vomit left by passing humans.

Not far away from the Memorial Gardens, across the road in the now rather uninspiring non-space of the ‘Triangular Gardens’, there’s a rather neglected pond/water feature thing which may be doing its bit to control the populations of geese, in being an area of water that the small goslings get into but then can’t get out of, owing to its concrete sides and generally wildlife-unfriendly design. If you’re passing by and have any concern about animal welfare perhaps you could check the gloomy pool to see if there are any stranded young geese, and lift them out, as others have recently. And perhaps we could ask why that pointless pool is still there, if all it does is cause distress to stranded goslings. Or perhaps its a cost-effective way of reducing numbers?

Apparently the council receives complaints every year about ‘the geese problem’. How many? What percentage of the general population is complaining? Has anyone worked it out? Is that in the report perhaps? I haven’t had time to read it all, and I doubt the councillors voting on it have either.

Councillors are supposed to listen and take up the issues local people are concerned about. Concerted lobbying by a few people will no doubt have results. I’m not convinced that goose poo and a bit of damage to bedding plants is high on the list of concerns for most people, and that there are far more important issues to worry about, scrutinise, and spend money and effort on. Or as a comment on the Press website put it:

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Plaque on Yorkshire Museum, Museum Gardens, 26 April 2016

Today’s ‘April daily photo‘ is the bronze plaque on the front of the Yorkshire Museum, in the Museum Gardens. It informs us that ‘The Yorkshire Philosophical Society transferred the Yorkshire Museum and Gardens to the citizens of York on January 2nd 1961′.

I’m pleased to see it’s still there, despite all the changes. And it’s a heartwarming message isn’t it. To think that these things are ours, that they’re owned by us, the citizens.

Though of course it’s the local authority, the City of York Council, that owns these things, really. Kind of on our behalf.

And then it has been complicated somewhat by the fact that York Museums Trust (YMT) has come into existence since these important assets were given to the citizens/local authority. The confusion last year over entry charges to the art gallery and museums made more of us think more about the role of YMT and the relationship between them and the council. It made me wonder who owns what, and also whether there’s a publicly accessible record of YMT meetings and decisions, similar to the records for council meetings which are available online on the council’s website.

I still don’t know the answer to that. But it may be of interest to the citizens of York to note that the council’s Executive meeting on Thursday 28 April includes an agenda item relating to YMT. It’s a packed programme, including the previously mentioned Goose Management Scrutiny Review (Final Report).

It’s not only the geese that have a Scrutiny Review Task Group scrutinising them. There’s also a York Museums Trust Scrutiny Review Task Group, and its report is number 6 on the agenda, just after the goose thing. There’s more information about the meeting on this link. The report itself is on this link (PDF).

Readers may remember that last August the Press ran a story headlined ‘Trust mooted idea of entry charges to Museum Gardens, claims councillor‘. I thought about writing about it at the time, but wasn’t sure what angle to take as the story seemed to be riddled with subtexts and hidden (or not so hidden) agendas. Reading between the lines it looked like one of those things where someone may have said ‘of course we could … (do whatever)’ without any intention of doing it, merely raising the point that this was technically possible.

It seemed such a ridiculously unacceptable idea that I couldn’t believe it would ever happen.

But then I notice, visiting the Museum Gardens, how much more money must have been spent on it in recent years, how much more ‘posh’ it is. The recent cafe plan for the pavilion being just a part of that. And it seems important not to be complacent, particularly now, as we know, our York Cards no longer give us free access to the YMT managed gallery and museums, including this one pictured above.

I’ve had a quick look through the report, looking for references to the Museum Gardens in particular. A fairly lengthy list of the ‘Core Partnership Objectives’ includes ‘Public access to the Museum Gardens’, but it doesn’t explicitly state that this will be ‘free public access’ or ‘public access without charge’.

Perhaps the meeting will clarify that point.

The Executive meeting starts at 5.30pm on Thursday and will be webcast: www.york.gov.uk/webcasts

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