Corner House pub, Burton Stone Lane, 5 Dec 2014

Some years back I wrote (several times) about the Corner House pub, on Burton Stone Lane, pictured above in December 2014. It was apparently going to be a(nother) Tesco store. Thankfully it isn’t. Time for an update, with a view of the same building, five years on:

Former Corner House pub, now a shop – Heron Foods – 16 Dec 2019

We often read about pubs closing, and it’s generally seen as a negative thing – and probably is, in many cases. But perhaps not always, if the building is reused and has more people going through its doors than it did before.

Many readers may remember Heron Foods at Stonebow House, before that building was gentrified. I remember a letter to the York Press from a reader who missed Heron Foods at Stonebow House, once it had gone. It moved here, to Burton Stone Lane, in the Clifton area of York, to the building that was for a long time the Corner House pub.

The shop on Burton Stone Lane is busy, and also now includes a post office counter. It’s clearly providing what people need. And because it’s a shop, and hasn’t been turned into flats, it also means that it’s still a building where you can pop in and see friendly/familiar faces and say hello, maybe have a bit of a chat and a laugh. So in some ways serving a social purpose like the pub it was, but without the beer … (and the sitting at tables, and the bands that once played there … etc).

Things have moved on here, clearly. But the bus stop remembers the old place …

The bus stop remembers a long-closed pub … (16 Dec 2019)

Perhaps time to update the bus stop sign to ‘Cromer Street’, after the street the Corner House/Heron Foods is on the corner of.

Some years back, when the Corner House closed, I did a bit of historical research. It was interesting to note, at the time, that this site on the corner wasn’t built on until some time after the surrounding area (Burton Stone Lane itself, and the terraced streets off it).

Since then I’ve found a photo from the piece of land that was empty then — where the Corner House was built, now Heron Foods — looking out onto Burton Stone Lane, in 1905.

Burton Stone Lane, from the corner with Cromer Street, 1905. Photo: William Hayes. (More infomation: thecardindex.com)

Just a rough grassed area back then, but for many years a car park, for the pub, and now a car park for the shop. (Though not much used as far as I can tell, as most people walk here, from the surrounding streets.)

In the photo above there’s a gentleman in a shop doorway across the road, towards the left of the photo. It’s not a shop now, as is the case with most of those old corner shops, but the building is still there, and I was standing in front of it when I took the two photos I included at the top of this page, from 2014, and now.

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We’re still with December Daily, and your virtual coffees are always appreciated, in my experimental period of daily postings to add to add this fairly ancient online presence.

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I’d been wondering why nothing had happened yet to turn the Corner House pub into a Tesco store, and the Press recently provided the answer: because Tesco are no longer interested in it. This was followed by the interesting suggestion that the Burton Lane WMC might move into it, an idea its members then voted against.

So it seems it may remain empty for a while yet, with those rather grim metal shutters across its windows, and of course the inevitable graffiti tags.

Any chance of it re-opening as a pub? Anyone have any information on this? If not, perhaps the Co-op would be interested. I’d be interested in a Co-op food store, as we don’t have one in this part of town.

If it’s going to sit there empty for months/years, could it perhaps have its lower half covered with wooden boards, and be designated a temporary ‘legal graffiti wall’? Perhaps one of the many skilled graffiti artists could decorate it with something meaningful/colourful. It’s not exactly enhancing the street scene as it is.

Perhaps the local community is already working on ideas for its reuse. Perhaps our new Labour councillors in Clifton are on the case. Comments and information welcome, as always.

Previous pages on the Corner House can be found on this link.

Not far away is Groves Chapel, which was supposed to be becoming a Sainsbury’s store. Nothing much happening on that front as far as I can tell. No planning application yet, and it still has ‘under offer’ on its for sale sign. Perhaps Sainsbury’s have changed their mind too? More on Groves Chapel on this link.

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The Corner House pub awaits its glorious future as a Tesco store. It has already been renamed, apparently. Amazing how quickly that was done. On official records like the council’s planning pages it may still be known as The Corner House, 165-167 Burton Stone Lane, but in recent weeks it has appeared on property websites under the new name of ‘Tesco Investment’.

Source: www.propertypilot.co.uk, Corner House

In recent days, more details have become available. The property is being sold for £725,000 and a 20-year lease to Tesco is in place. They’re getting the first six months rent free. Is that a common arrangement? I’ve got no idea. Anyway, it’s opening in the spring, apparently, and will look like that image above. Or something like it. Not sure that doorway arrangement with aisles running diagonally from the corner is an accurate representation. There’ll be a planning application at some point with more detail, presumably. There must be some kind of planning application at some stage, surely.

No steam engine or slaughterhouse

The PDFs available on that link above are worth a look, particularly the Register Plans document, as it gives us a bit of the history of this plot of land, this place where a pub was since the 1930s. The old deeds contain some rules about what’s not allowed:

‘NO steam engine furnace blacksmiths shop slaughterhouse or building for the purpose of carrying on any offensive trade or manufacture shall be erected built used or kept upon the pieces or parcels of land intended to be hereby conveyed … The Purchaser shall not excavate for gravel sand or other materials to be used in the making of roads or otherwise nor use any clay for the manufacturing of bricks which may be found in the pieces or parcels of land’

Source (PDF)

Meanwhile, at the Punch Bowl

Elsewhere, slightly more hopeful signs that this ‘suddenly there’s a Tesco’ thing won’t be able to keep happening unchecked.

Here on my patch, not far away from the Corner House/Tesco Investment, is the Punch Bowl, also previously discussed. Campaigners are hoping to give some protection to it and other pubs through an Article 4 Direction.

Though the council hasn’t yet decided whether it’s prepared to go for an Article 4 Direction, as the meeting to decide that has been postponed (decision due at a meeting this week, apparently), there was a motion from Cllr D’Agorne on the subject at the council meeting on Thursday just gone. (Point (iv) in this document (PDF)).

‘Council calls on Cabinet to follow the example of other councils by swiftly introducing an Article 4 exemption to GPDO 1995 so as to require application for planning permission for such change of use within the boundary of the City of York, starting with the Punch Bowl in the Groves as an urgent priority. In addition Council supports the provision of advice to local groups on how to register their local pub as a ‘community asset’, identifying key social assets in local communities that need to be protected.’

It was followed by an interesting discussion with general agreement.

If this is the new style ‘fresh start’ politics then I hope we see more of it.

Here’s the video of the relevant part of the meeting, with this motion and discussion at 1 hr 15 mins in (or cued to start in the right place on this link.

If you’d like to encourage the council to put the Article 4 Direction in place, you might like to send an email to cllr.dwilliams@york.gov.uk politely indicating that you support this idea and would like them to get on with it before the Punch Bowl turns into a Tesco.

Personally I think it’s about time more attention was paid to things like this, to what’s going on beyond the city walls in the wider area where most of the council tax payers live, and I’m hoping that part of the ‘fresh start’ we’re supposed to be having will see the council doing that.

Too late for the Corner House, sadly.

Thanks to Nick and Bryan for updates.

More information: Article 4 Direction

The council has apparently already approved an Article 4 Direction in 2011 to try to control another issue, that of houses being turned into HMOs. More information here. They’re used for many different purposes, and are apparently used a lot in Brighton and Hove to protect heritage assets.

And here’s a very helpful article on the subject, with context and background.

More on the Corner House/Marston’s/Tesco situation

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Corner House, Oct 2014

Corner House, Nov 2014. Photo: Bry

It was one of those occasions when one building seems to stand for something much bigger. It reminded me of the Barratt signs at the edge of the garden around Burton Croft, just up the road, years back, announcing ‘LAND ACQUIRED’. In the middle of that garden was a house people had cared about. It was just acquired property to the property developer. Same here. A place I passed where the lights were always on, the doors were open, people were inside or out on the steps, now all silent and dead, grey shutters across the windows, no lights on, no one home.

The dead hand of big business has reached in to something it didn’t understand or value and just turned all the lights off, and said, it’s not yours anymore, it’s ours. Like all the other places money buys. You lot, you’re too poor, you don’t matter. That’s what it says, from its blank shuttered face.

And it’s going to sit there, looking ugly and empty, in the middle of our local community. It looks like something from one of the riot-hit areas of the 1980s. Tesco and Marston’s pub company don’t have to look at it. We do.

I got in and directed an angry tweet at Tesco. Then realised how futile and pointless it was, being angry at the massive omnipresent Tesco. Like shaking your fist at a torrential downpour.

Still, it needs saying. I drafted this page on Tuesday evening. It’s Friday evening now, and I still think it needs saying.

I feel angry on behalf of the pub’s regular customers, on behalf of the landlord who worked hard, but most of all on behalf of my neighbourhood, which has lost a pub and is getting a Tesco whether it likes it or not.

The Corner House may at one time have been ‘a rough pub’. Most suburban pubs in the middle of large areas of housing like this seem to get that reputation at some time or another. But the story I’ve been getting loud and clear is that the landlord who had the pub recently turned it around and turned it into a friendly place very much valued by its regulars and by its community. So much so that he won an award last year. Here he is, Steve Pryce, getting his award from Francine Clee at The Press. Judges said: ‘Stephen has turned the business around and turned it into a friendly and welcoming place.’

Community Pride Awards 2013 (Photo courtesy of The Press)

‘I love my job’, he said, when receiving the award. A job he’s now lost, just a year later, because the pub company sold the pub to Tesco.

This isn’t just about a particular pub in a particular area. I think we all know it’s a bigger issue than that. And it isn’t just about supermarkets buying suburban pubs from the big pub companies. This is being covered very well by the Press and by local campaigners (see links below).

What I’m thinking about most is the massive contrast between what has been happening in the Bishopthorpe Road area and what has happened here in Clifton. Over there they’ve taken steps to protect the Winning Post. We just let Tesco buy the Corner House, and did nothing.

Over on Bishy Rd (as we all seem to call it now — we always did, when chatting, but not usually in writing, until recently) the Winning Post has just been ‘saved’, as the Press put it. It’s one of those oversimplified headlines — it hasn’t actually been saved from all supermarket threats forever, it’s just got a layer of protection it didn’t have before.

The point is that the local community — in the form of the local trade association — took action to have the Winning Post recognised for its community value, and they did this before there’s any threat from a supermarket to buy it.

Whereas here, over in Clifton, the purchase of the local pub by Tesco happened quickly and quietly, with apparently no challenge at all.

It might be that it would have closed anyway, but it closed so quickly and with so little protest, that’s what seems so wrong. And it’s just part of a bigger picture, something that needs to change, something we all need to play a part in if we care about our local communities.

The other moment I’d like to mention from Tuesday night’s short walk across my local patch was just before I saw the boarded-up Corner House pub. A few minutes before, at the chip shop in the short parade of shops further along. I saw a sign on the door about a petition to protect another local asset under threat. I asked about it in the shop, and the young woman said: ‘They’re closing our community centre’.

Heading home, back up Burton Stone Lane, I was thinking about that comment, ‘They’re closing our community centre’, and then I passed the Corner House, with its blanked out look, like it had been removed from the neighbourhood.

‘They’re closing our community centre’, and they’ve taken our pub. It’s a different ‘they’, but these things felt linked, and all the way home and since I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve also been thinking about the differences between the thriving Bishy Road area and my apparently dying Clifton neighbourhood.

Graffiti on the back of a sign pointing down Water Lane: ‘Clifton Town’, Oct 2014

I knew about the threat to the community centre, not because I use it but because I’ve read about it online. I wanted to sign the petition, but they didn’t have it in the chip shop, they just had the notice about it being handed over. I haven’t seen it in any of the other shops, and haven’t seen anything about it online. Something wrong here, in Clifton. All a bit disjointed and powerless, aren’t we.

‘They’re closing our community centre’.

Who are ‘they’ and who is ‘us’, who’s the ‘our’? I’ve thought about this a lot in recent months. But right now it looks sharp and stark, because of the boarded-up pub, and that comment.

In the case of the threat to the community centre, ‘they’ is the council. But the council, in the 21st century, shouldn’t still look like ‘they’ to the citizens, shouldn’t be something/someone imposing things/taking things away, the enemy, the lord of the manor with the power to decide everything that happens. ‘They’, the council, is just made up of individuals like ‘us’.

The loss of the pub — the ‘they’ are the pub company and Tesco — big businesses with a massive turnover and massive wealth and massive power, but ‘we’ — residents and our representatives, the local councillors — should have done more to challenge, not just laid down and let it all ride over us, an inevitable thing. It’s not the 1950s, we do have power and tools at our disposal, the internet and social media for example — but we failed.

Nothing links up around here, and so it’s just individual sad voices lamenting loss. And a petition I wanted to sign but couldn’t find. And a pub gone forever which, in a different part of York, might still be a pub.

. . . . .

I hope that whoever is elected to serve Clifton in the 2015 elections does their best to link us up better than this, and to inform us of our powers and our rights. I’ll be doing my bit, in my own way, I’ve tried already.

But it isn’t just about Clifton, it’s about all our communities, and about knowing our own power and rights and claiming them, and trying, and not thinking that ‘they’ can take whatever they like from ‘us’, the things that are, or were, ours. ‘Them’ and ‘us’ needs some merging, and ‘we’, all of us, need to care more and do more about the things on our patch, and perhaps stop thinking that someone else will do it for us.

More/links

Corner House pub in Burton Stone Lane closes after 77 years

The Winning Post, in Bishopthorpe Road, saved from being turned into shop

Information on the ‘Community Right to Bid’ – how to register ‘assets of community value’. More information: Wikipedia and City of York Council information
More on the Localism Act, from locality.org.uk

The ‘Be Vocal for Your Local‘ campaign in The Press

Let York residents shape its neighbourhoods – not desperate, corporate bean-counters far away – Gavin Aitchison in The Press

The post A tale of two pubs … appeared first on York Stories.

Photo: Bry

So the Corner House has closed. I can’t claim to have any insight into this pub closure issue, but I do know that I’m really shocked at the ease with which a pub can apparently turn into a supermarket, as this one is going to. In these days of increased awareness of community assets, and people power, and with so many safeguards written in to planning policy, it seems mighty odd that Tesco can just appear and buy a pub from a pub company, so we get a shop where a pub used to be.

It appears no one locally with the power to challenge this did so. I haven’t seen any evidence that our local councillors tried to do anything. I’m feeling a bit guilty that I didn’t try to do something. No one set up a campaign. Seems it was just accepted as inevitable.

There’s a petition to try to change this state of affairs, to protect other pubs.

Corner House, October 2014. Photo: Bry

I’ve had a quick look at maps of the area (via old-maps.co.uk) to get some idea when the pub was built. 1930s, apparently. It’s not on the 1931 map – the site appears to have been left empty when the houses around were built. It is on the 1937 map. So clearly built between those two dates. And as the York City football club ground opened close by in 1932 I imagine the two are connected – the pub would have been built to serve all those thirsty City fans before and after matches. The football club is due to relocate to the new Community Stadium in a couple of years, and housing will be built where the pitch is now. Perhaps all those new residents will be glad of a Tesco nearby.

These days pubs like these have to diversify, perhaps in the form of more events and entertainment. The Corner House recently played host to Michael Jackson, in October, and Elvis, in November. (Yes, tribute acts. Not the real ones.)

‘Michael Jackson’ at the Corner House, October 2014. Photo: Bry

Andy ‘Elvis’ Wood, at the Corner House, Nov 2014. Photo (video still): Bry

The video from which the image above was taken is below, and really worth a watch. And you’ll notice that the pub is busy, looks quite packed. Whether it’s always like that on weekend evenings, whether it’s only like that when there’s live music, whether it’s only like that because people realised it was closing soon and made more of an effort to get there, I don’t know. Bry or other regulars might want to comment. But I guess it doesn’t matter now anyway, because soon we’ll be able to buy bread or cheap booze where Andy ‘Elvis’ Wood is doing his rather impressive Elvis thing.

He can of course do his act in any other pubs. And the people watching him can go to those pubs instead. And perhaps all these people in the Corner House will just instead go up to the top of Burton Stone Lane, to the Burton Stone pub on the corner. Maybe we don’t need this pub here in the centre of this community. If there are people who will really miss it, well, their voices haven’t been heard and probably won’t be now.

I’ll leave you with Bry and his pint. And we have Andy ‘Elvis’ Wood to sing us out, with Suspicious Minds.

One of the last pints in “the corner house” sad days pic.twitter.com/MafpV40JKh

— Bry (@Roy_Batty29) November 16, 2014

Take it away, Elvis. Thank you and goodnight, Corner House. Drinking up time.

The post Goodbye Corner House appeared first on York Stories.

As previously mentioned, there are concerns that Tesco is interested in the Punch Bowl, on a prominent corner at the edge of the Groves area. Tesco is certainly interested in the pub pictured above, the Corner House, in the middle of another large area of terraced housing, to the west of the Groves, in Clifton.

In recent weeks this sign has appeared on a side door, suggesting that negotiations/plans are well advanced. It’s a licensing application made by Tesco Stores. A standard application for mini-supermarkets. I’m sure we’ve all seen these before, as so many mini-supermarkets have appeared in recent years.

It’s obvious why Tesco would be interested in this site. The Corner House pub is on Burton Stone Lane, in the middle of a large residential area. Burton Stone Lane is a long road and an old road, it’s the spine all these terraced streets were built around. It’s a busy thoroughfare, with more shops further along.

As the photo above shows, it’s a large pub, set back from the road with a parking area in front of it.

Altogether a perfect site for a mini-supermarket, I guess.

Though I have to say this would never have occurred to me, as it seemed to be doing well as a pub. When I pass it seems fairly busy for a pub in the suburbs.

Also, there’s a Sainsbury’s Local just a bit further down the road. And these mini-supermarkets aren’t that different from one another, so I’m not sure the local community really needs two rather similar supermarkets on the same road.

Personally I really like the Co-op, and wish they’d set up shop in Clifton. But perhaps they don’t go around trying to find pubs to buy to turn into shops. Or perhaps the pub companies don’t think of approaching Co-op when they’ve got a pub they want to sell.

Similarities and differences

So, two pubs not far apart, the Punch Bowl and the Corner House, both apparently under threat, being eyed by Tesco. They have a number of similarities. They’re both in the north-west suburban area just outside the city centre. Both on a corner site, and both seem popular and well-used.

But one is the subject of a vigorous and well-publicised campaign, and the other isn’t, as far as I know. Why the difference, I wonder.

There may be a fight going on to save the Corner House, and it might just be that I haven’t heard about it. If there is, or if you have any further information, please let me know.

And memories of ancient days …

Well, ok, not ancient. The late 1980s.

I watched bands here, back then. Or rather, I remember at least one gig by a York band. There may have been more than one occasion. It’s so long ago and memories blur into rosy nostalgia.

If anyone else remembers seeing bands here back then, do add a comment.

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