Water Lane, Clifton, grain stores site residential development, 17 April 2016

From a long-established residential area of York and a photo taken ten years ago to a new residential area under construction, and a photo taken today. This site is on my patch, in Clifton, and just across from Clifton Backies, which I wander through often.

Around 200 homes are to be built here, on the old grain stores site on Water Lane in Clifton. I remember the grain stores, large hangars visible from the road. This was one of the remnants of the massive site of RAF Clifton, most of it cleared and redeveloped a few decades back (Clifton Moor).

Rather than delve into that history, let’s focus on now, the 21st century. It seems important to mention the fact that this development hit the headlines of the local press in 2013: Scheme for 200 houses at former grain stores site Clifton gets go-ahead from inspector. Planning inspector John Gray gave the go-ahead for the site with no provision needed for ‘affordable housing':

Mr Gray said the principles behind supporting affordable housing were robust and popular but flexibility was needed to ensure the total number of homes built was not “unacceptably depressed”.

He said: “The shortfall of housing land in the city of York means that the need to identify deliverable housing land is inescapable.”

He also said the grain stores site could be turned into housing quickly and development “should not be unduly delayed by seeking too high a percentage of affordable housing”.

He seems to have been right in his comment that this particular site could be developed ‘quickly’. Above we have the evidence that building is underway and has been for some months.

There’s also a planning application for an Aldi store on part of the grain stores site, and that’s due to be decided soon.

Those who drive on the roads in the area may be concerned about the increase in traffic from the residential development. But this is a (large) brownfield site, it’s the kind of place favoured for new build (rather than the greenbelt), and it seems to have progressed quickly once the permission was in place. There’s a shortage of housing and a recognition that we need to build more.

The red Redrow flags are flying and the show homes appear to be open. (There’s a surprising amount of grass in front of them: a garage door with plants in front of it suggests that some of this greenery may make way for roads and driveways.)

Comments welcome, as always.

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The location and context is clearer in this video. The massive crane on the Hiscox site is prominent in the background, in the view from Rowntree Wharf.

It’s not just the noise. I think many people near the busy brownfields will identify with this. Another short video, and a very powerful personal perspective, again from ‘yorkeye’ on YouTube.

I was interested to see a piece in the Press recently regarding a letter written by council leader James Alexander to Nick Clegg. It included his response to the idea that Government could ‘help fund proposed council tax reductions for people living near big new housing developments’.

I imagine the communities referred to are those living on the edge of the built-up areas, near the green belt, rather than those of us in the centre and suburbs. Here near the ‘brownfields’ we’ve been accommodating building sites for years. When I started this site there were many, mainly flats being built. It quietened down because of the recession, but now we’re off again with cranes looming over the Walmgate and Hungate areas. And of course many smaller developments too, in the suburbs. Building sites very close to buildings where people live and work.

I know I’m not alone being rather bemused and a little frustrated by some of the green belt lobbying, by people who are living in houses built in the last few decades on what was greenfield until recently.

Much of the lobbying to protect the green belt relies on our romantic attachments to any undeveloped ‘green and pleasant lands’. But it should be more honest. A lot of it is simply because those on the outskirts don’t want to lose their views and don’t want to live near a building site.

As the above videos illustrate, residents in the city centre have had to accommodate both of those things, the loss of views and the nuisance of building site noise. Perhaps the residents near the fields should accept that they too need to be more accommodating? We can’t build it all on the brownfields.

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It’s not often I exclaim ‘Oh wow’ to myself in the middle of the street, but I did when I saw the size of this thing, looming massively, looming even more than Hilary House behind us.

The photo doesn’t do it justice so I’ll have to attempt to convey it words. On either side of us, historic buildings, framing the beginnings of a building for the 21st century, for Hiscox. Rising up from the middle of the site a huge drill-type thing, which I think is probably called a pile driver, paused and still and waiting for the next working day to begin. Behind it Rowntree Wharf, a big brave confident building from an earlier century. Behind that, the cranes over the Walmgate building sites.

By late October the Hiscox site, viewed from Dundas Street alongside, looked like this:

Viewed from the other side, Stonebow House loomed rather gloomily over the artist’s impression on the bright Hiscox hoardings:

One morning in early November I called back again to see how things were progressing. Beautiful sunny day, blue sky, very mild, and the site full of activity. Building sites can be a very positive sight, and this place is positively buzzing. It’s probably the most exciting building site I’ve visited in the course of my wanderings over these ten years.

Probably mainly because it’s a workplace, rather than yet more apartments.

Even the ads on the hoardings are a class above the usual thing, those rather silly ads for apartment developments. These are black, white and red, with confident, bold statements. Very classy indeed.

The hoardings also have an image of how it will look from Peasholme Green, alongside the Black Swan. An interesting contrast:

On sunny days over the winter, if I’m up that way, I’ll try to keep a record of progress. Many residents are watching developments with interest. I didn’t meet anyone else taking photos but I did have a nice chat with a man who was standing by the site watching that massive crane do its thing. Other people wandering by gazed up at it. The site has been empty and quiet for some years, and all this is quite a contrast.

I’ll end the page with another image taken on 3 November, from the side of the site, on Dundas Street. Which, when I started these wanderings ten years ago, was home to an ambulance station with rusty gates and just across the road an old coachworks building, low, functional, red brick, with a fading painted sign.

It’s certainly changed a bit around here in the Hungate development area. Just across the way my favourite urban brownfield buddleia forest still grows, but probably not for much longer. It too I guess will soon give way to concrete and cranes.

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Or something.

I’m still trying to work it out and find my way through the information/misinformation.

The Local Plan is massive and complex, and just thinking about it may bring on fatigue and a sense of quiet desperation, so let’s calm and reinvigorate ourselves before contemplating it by focussing our eyes on something green. And brown. A bit of open land, green field/green belt between Rufforth and Knapton. Pictured in springtime a few years ago.

An earlier page discussed ‘brownfield’ land, and how the word makes it sound all dead and rubbish. Whereas ‘green belt’ is an appealing and emotive term, evoking a sense of the last vestiges of ye olde countryside preserved. Our modern-day walls maybe, protecting us not from enemy invaders as our old stone defences did but from ‘urban sprawl’, from being joined to Leeds, or worse, Copmanthorpe.

For some months now I’ve been thinking about the ‘green belt’, trying to think of it in terms of specific bits of land, instead of in that rather vague way I’ve always thought of it before.

I thought of the open land to the right of Wigginton Road as you approach the city. I don’t value it for any picturesque qualities it has in itself, but because it creates a gap, which means that just for a moment, as you’re travelling along Wigginton Road, you see the Minster rising up on the horizon from behind the roadside hedge and framed by far-off trees. Like our medieval ancestors might have seen it. But I think the land there is part of Bootham Stray, so is presumably protected from development anyway.

I don’t have a photo of that view, so here’s a similar view from Bad Bargain Lane (the far-flung track-like part of it).

There’s pressure to find space for housing, and the Local Plan suggests some green belt areas which may be used. And of course, that isn’t popular. It’s not the whole green belt most campaigners are worried about, it’s particular bits of it. Maybe the bit their homes overlook or the bit they walk their dogs on at the moment or where they go to get some greenery and quiet. Understandable that residents would be upset at the thought of losing a place they value or a view they value.

But then all our homes spoiled someone else’s view, ‘concreted over’ a place previous citizens enjoyed as a green place. And surely no one who bought a 20th century built house on the edge of York expected that they would have a view of green fields forever, and that this was their entitlement? That somehow their street or area was the last phase in the city’s expansion?

Another view from the track leading to Bad Bargain Lane, on an evening in April, some years ago. (Can be enlarged.) Perhaps this idyllic scene has already been built on since. I must cycle out there sometime to have a look.

Those campaigning to protect the green belt often state that we should ‘build on the brownfield sites instead’. What they mean, I think, is ‘build it all somewhere else and not near me’.

Though the larger sites (Nestlé South, British Sugar, Terry’s, York Central) still haven’t been built on, there’s been so much new housing development in recent years on the smaller ‘brownfield’ sites that it’s hard to keep up. Off the top of my head, just near my part of town: on Heworth Green; near Haxby Road school; on Shipton St School; on the Groves WMC site; on the Abbots Mews hotel site; on Clifton Garage site.

Then there are the massive blocks built as student housing on Lawrence Street, off Walmgate, on Carmelite Street. The flats on the Hungate site. And so on.

All that building affects those nearby, and many of us living near these sites have lost our views, our open spaces, have seen towering tall things changing the horizon. But it’s what happens. Always has, always will.

Looking back, rather than forwards, I’m sure the cowkeepers of Clifton weren’t happy when the fields around here were covered with terraced housing in the late 19th century. But I’m rather glad that happened as otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here in one of them typing this, and would have nowhere to plug in the laptop. If you’re in a late 20th century home at the edge of the built-up area then your house spoiled someone else’s ‘green belt’/green field view within living memory.

Those brownfield developments, as I’m sure we’ve all noticed, are often apartments, tall blocks, making the most of the available land in prime locations by building as tall as possible. They’re a far cry from those 1920s and 1930s semis out in Acomb and Burnholme and well, everywhere, with gardens front and back. Looks like we might need some more open land to build some new houses like that? Do the people who already live in nice houses out in Skelton etc not think other people deserve a house with a bit of space around it?

So many small apartments have been built in the last decade or so that I think planners must have forecasted that the majority of the population would be divorced, or young and childless, or a student. Some couples, despite the austerity and misery, have managed to stay together, and some even managed to make children, and they perhaps don’t all want to cram into small city centre apartments.

Just a few thoughts from a non-expert, just observing it all and trying to make sense of it. Comments welcome below. Facts are particularly welcome. I’m finding it difficult to split fact from fiction and spin and propaganda, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

I’ll leave you with this roadsign on a narrow lane near York, where an even narrower lane apparently leads to ‘Farms only’. It isn’t only housing development threatening the green belt. If we believe the more inflammatory comments made recently on the Local Plan, this could soon read ‘Wind Farms Only’.

Elsewhere on the web

Local Plan consultation, on the City of York Council website

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The Hungate development site, with Stonebow House rising up like some kind of brutalist concrete ship from a sea of greenery. This kind of site may be weedy, mainly made up of the ubiquitous buddleia, but it has its own apparently limitless vigour. It needs no maintenance, no artificial feeding or watering, and is valuable to smaller creatures even if we don’t value it much.

Brownfield, in its widest and generally accepted definition, just means previously developed land. It isn’t an attractive word, and suggests desolate industrial sites, all dead and polluted, where nothing grows. As discussion continues over the Local Plan, I keep hearing people on radio phone-ins saying that we should be building only on the brownfield sites — usually because they live near the green belt and don’t want housing building near them.

We are of course building on the brownfield. Maybe not as quickly as some would like, but this bit has been built on since this photo was taken, in June 2006. Part of the Hungate site, since covered with apartments.

Foxgloves were blooming here, that summer, and as noted at the time this one in particular was so handsome that I thought it was worth a hundred hanging baskets. Bees love these flowers, and the sound of a bumble bee happily stuffing its furry body into the trumpet of a foxglove flower is one of the cheeriest sounds you can hear on a summer evening.

The railway yards on Leeman Road, in summer 2004. A vast area of land where it seemed no one had been for decades. Most memorable were the goldfinches suddenly rising chirruping from the weedy greenness, feeding on August’s bountiful seeding. And the old rolling stock amongst nature’s reclaiming of the place. Rowan trees, full of berries, to feed other creatures later when the colder days came.

More recently, a June evening this year, surprising flowerings on Penley’s Grove Street. The light was too low for me to properly capture the variety of blooms springing up from this weedy patch, white, blue, purple, red, and the foxgloves again. Next to the site where Groves WMC used to be — now townhouses and apartments, all neat and new — this riotous tangle.
Some of the flowers looked to be familiar garden plants rather than the usual weeds.

Towards the back of this yet-to-be-developed brownfield site are boarded up buildings — old coach houses belonging to Settrington House, which originally occupied this site. These buildings and the ornate gate posts at the entrance are all that remains.

These two photos taken from more or less the same spot show how quickly and vigorously the brownfield grows its greenery. This was taken on 12 April 2011.

And this on 19 June 2013.

A late 19th century town plan shows that Settrington House itself didn’t take up much room on its plot of land. It was towards the back, with its coach houses alongside, and in front of it a curving driveway. The plan shows planted areas alongside the sweep of drive. Near the gate the curve of the current weedy flowery patch seems to imitate those long-lost 19th century flowerbeds. Accidentally of course. I think the builders dumped some earth here by the gate, and within it were seeds waiting their chance.

Or perhaps a guerilla gardener threw seeds here a summer ago. Who knows. But Settrington House has its garden again, briefly, weedily, splendidly.

It reminds me of a comment by Ralph Harrington, on Twitter, when Tower Street was flooded: ‘This area was once the moat for Clifford’s Tower: it wants to be again.’ These urban places greening over want to be gardens again. Or perhaps the fields and woodlands they were long ago.

Elsewhere on the web

Brownfield — The Wildlife Trusts

Leading ecologist champions value of urban areas for wildlife

Brownfield sites are havens for wildlife. A London perspective, from Fred Pearce writing in the Telegraph in 2007: ‘… in our increasingly landscaped and sanitised world, some of our most astounding wildlife habitats are on derelict urban land’

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