A photo taken around 100 years ago, at the bottom of Queen Anne’s Road, on the line of the ancient lane/snicket in front of what was Queen Anne’s School (now St Olave’s). One of Mr Fairbank’s photos, part of what appears to be a general survey of the state of the roads and pavements. The caption notes that it was taken ’18 hours after rainfall’. We should, he notes, ‘Observe water standing.’

A hundred years later, this weekend, many citizens were to be found observing water standing, in various locations in the city and suburbs, after heavy rain. Whereas Mr Fairbank had to take what I imagine was an enormous camera on a tripod to take his photographs, we have smartphones and Twitter.

‘Observe water standing': Groves Lane

Drain watching: Groves Lane. Photo: Mark Antrobus

And later:

The Press carried dramatic pictures of ‘York’s drains crisis’ — rather large lakes of water, flash floods, in many suburban streets. On a rain-drenched walk through streets off Burton Stone Lane on Friday evening I had to abandon my intended route as a huge puddle covered the road and both pavements:

Extreme weather events can’t be blamed on the council. But blocked drains causing localised flooding perhaps can be. Another story in the Press this week highlighted major cutbacks to the gully cleaning regime, prompting queries over whether the two were connected.

It’s not an exciting subject, on the surface of things, but please don’t leave yet. People of York, look to your gullies. They’re the bits at the edge of the roads, where water collects and slides along towards the drains. Well, that’s the idea.

In the Groves. There’s a drain under there somewhere. Photo: Gwen Swinburn

Here’s a photo of a bit of roadside gully and drain. The drain is rather hidden under debris and weeds. This one is in the Groves area of York, but weedy gullies are everywhere, so I’m told. I think most of us don’t pay much attention, until things go wrong. Which is fair enough. We expect the council to look after the gullies and drains in our streets, the part of the system of drainage they’re apparently responsible for.

The flash floods of Friday evening seemed to be another flashpoint in the rather strained relations between many York citizens and the council, as many angry comments on Twitter and elsewhere illustrated.

Would more frequent cleaning make a difference? Would it mean residents weren’t wading through enormous puddles? Here’s part of the report prepared for the council:

• It is a false economy to minimise scheduled gully cleaning and rely on reactive cleaning. There are major efficiencies in proactive bulk cleaning on a scheduled basis and this would reduce the number of expensive one-off reactive visits which can disrupt routine work. It would also enable flood risk to be managed more effectively.
• The current priority of scheduled cleaning of gullies only on gritting routes is flawed, and is not based on flood risk management requirements. Locations that have suffered surface water flooding, affecting the highway as well as property, are unlikely to be on gritting routes, but are most likely to be residential areas. As this study has shown, lack of routine maintenance in such areas can aggravate the effects of surface water flooding.

(Source: item 68 on this link)

Why is it so annoying to read this? Why does it matter if a few drains are blocked?

Because we see an awful lot of money being spent, and many people think it isn’t being spent where it should be. Opinions differ on what’s worthwhile, but a lot of it seems to be wasted. Two words — Lendal Bridge — money down the drain, as the saying goes. Rather than rainwater down the drains, which would be preferable.

Photo: Gwen Swinburn

Gully cleaning is clearly quite complicated to organise in many of our residential areas, because parked cars in the terraced streets in particular make access impossible for the council’s cleaning vehicle. They have to give several days notice and prevent anyone parking on the street they need to clean. A cursory glance at the gullies during my walk to the local shop showed that many were full of weeds and litter, and standing water.

So, the street gullies fill with silt, tree debris, litter. As pictured in Gwen’s photo above. And then as the rain comes down it washes it all to the grates, where it sits, blocking them, or goes into the drain, then into the sewers, presumably blocking them eventually, as many of them are old and fractured and have tree roots partially blocking them already.

Or that’s my understanding. I’m not an expert on these matters. If you are, please add a comment.

Scouring the ditches

This staring at drains has reminded me of numerous references in the archives to the need to ‘scour the ditches’, a phrase I rather like, though I’m not entirely sure what it involved, as I’ve never had to look after a watercourse. But I imagine that scouring the ditches in days of old was a precursor to cleaning the gulleys. Here’s a snippet of an 18th century book of rules on ditch-scouring and other things, turned up by a quick Google, as after all this boring drains talk we’re in need of the kind of mild amusement these old documents provide:

(Source)

There are many references to ditch-scouring in the Quarter Sessions for York in the 17th century. In the summer of 1650 several people were in trouble for ‘not scouring ditches towards the lanes leading to the City’ (‘4 persons from Holgate & Acomb’ get particular mention) or ‘for not scouring a water-sewer in the Bishopfields’.

Perhaps we all need to muck in again, like we did back then, before ‘the Corporation’ and City of York Council took over responsibility for such things.

Over the weekend I was walking through St John’s Street in the Groves, where the gullies were particularly clogged. A great pile of debris and litter and silt surrounded the grate at the end of the street. Someone had clearly intervened, a little, and dragged some of it away from the grate. But then left it there. So that yesterday, when it rained again, it would have been washed back to where it was, or down the drain.

Perhaps one of the residents of the street, maybe a couple of residents working together, could have got a broom and shovel and cleaned it up properly? Would have only taken a few minutes. Maybe we should all be doing that, if we notice a problem? It’s made me wonder if I should. Seems it might be quicker and more efficient than reporting it to the council via smartphone/website and then waiting however long for them to get around to it in their ‘reactive cleaning’.

But the usual answer is that we pay our council tax for the council to do it.

The city council take a lot of money from us in council tax, and we see how many thousands of pounds they spend/waste, and we think about how hard we work to make a fraction of that to pay the rent/mortgage/bills, and then we have to wade through water or turn round and go the longer way home because of blocked drains, and we wonder if those drains are perhaps blocked because instead of spending money on the things that would make our lives easier they’re spending our money on crap we didn’t want in the first place, or on badly realised visitor-focused ‘visions’, as in the Lendal Bridge cock-up, which ended up wasting obscene amounts of money.

Is that a fair summary of some of the public feeling?

Comments welcome. Will you be helping out the council by ‘scouring the ditches’/cleaning your street gullies?

Or perhaps by doing a bit of weeding. More on that story later.

. . . . .

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A piece in the Press recently highlighted that a decision is due this week on the Bert Keech bowling club site on Sycamore Place. I wrote about this bowling club a couple of years back, including a photo of its signs, as that was all I could see of the place.

There are more photos on the council’s website, on the relevant planning application pages. Many interesting documents are made available online with planning applications, and this one includes a report on the archaeology of the site. A site which apparently has a Roman road running through it. In the 19th century, when the area was first filled with housing, various interesting relics were unearthed in this area. So presumably there will be a full-scale archaeological excavation before anything is built here. Or perhaps we’ll rely on having the director of the CBA wander past at the right time …

Is this brownfield, perhaps? The city’s football ground was classed as such, a decade or so ago when Persimmon wanted to build on it. Even though it has a massive green area in the middle of it. When I say massive, I mean … well, the size of a football pitch. We often measure things in terms of x-number of football pitches, don’t we. Easy in that case. One football pitch.

Whereas the bowling club site obviously has a bowling green sized green space in the middle of it. Not massive, but big enough to fit a few houses on. And we need to find somewhere to put them. So no doubt it will be built on, just like so many other bowling greens.

It has been out of use for so many years now that it has fallen off the radar, or as the planning documents put it ‘it has not been an operational sports facility for over 5 years’. Any bowlers who did use it, or the other greens in the area (like the one behind the art gallery, also lost) have all moved to Clarence Gardens instead. Or perhaps just given up going bowling.

So the weed-filled old green is a totally unwanted bit of sports ground/green space.

But no, apparently not. The documents relating to the planning application suggest that St Olave’s School (with premises adjacent, in the old Queen Anne’s School buildings) or their senior school St Peter’s would like to take it over and use it for sports.

Is that likely? Well, no, it doesn’t seem to be, from what I can tell from the documents available.

The new houses will no doubt sell very quickly when built, because homes in this desirable residential area are in demand, partly I guess because of those nearby schools just mentioned.

If you look at the documents you’ll see that there are a lot of objections. Of course, you might say, there always are. Very few people welcome building sites. We all accept the need for new homes, but we don’t want them building near us.

There’s a vague general agreement that we should ‘build on the brownfield’ first, in already built-up areas, rather than on the outskirts, on the green belt, the green fields. But of course it was all fields once.

I happen to have, again from the Fairbank archive, a couple of photos from when the 19th century housing around here was itself quite new, as the captions make clear.

Sycamore Place (then Sycamore Terrace), circa 1913. (c) Arup

(Compare with: 2012 Google Street View of this scene)

Sycamore Terrace — now known as Sycamore Place (with Sycamore Terrace leading from it, to the right). The area since known as the Bert Keech Bowls Club would have been off to the left of this photo. As it was apparently established in 1912 it was perhaps there already when Mr Fairbank took this photo. Maybe he popped in for a game of bowls after he’d taken his photographs. Or maybe,  as he lived just round the corner in St Mary’s, he popped back home for a spot of lunch.

The state of the roads was rather different then, as the caption makes clear. As does this one, from close by, near the other end of Sycamore Place, looking down Longfield Terrace.

Longfield Terrace/Sycamore Place, circa 1913. (c) Arup

(Compare with: 2012 Google Street View of this scene)

I’m assuming that Mr Fairbank was recording the state of the roads for professional purposes, rather than as a personal interest. He records that the road here is just soil. Sycamore Place is just off to the right. The railway line is to the left behind those trees. It appears that something is being built or constructed. Perhaps some better road surfacing.

He notes in his caption: ‘Houses built 20 years’. So quite new then.

Perhaps Mr Fairbank felt sad, in the 1890s, to see these long lines of buildings going up across the open land he’d known.

Now we refer to green areas being ‘concreted over’. I guess back then, as Victorian houses are as far as I know built on brick foundations, they wrote letters to the paper about their fields being ‘bricked over’.

Or did they? Perhaps they just accepted all these new houses as part of ‘progress’.

Should we do the same? Though how long before it gets too crowded? The Victorian era saw a lot of cramped housing being built. We pulled a lot of it down in the 1930s.

Google captures the demise of a green

When I include these old photos it seems a nice idea to if possible include the modern view, or a link to Google’s version of it if I’m too lazy to get up there myself. So I’ve done that via the links above. But while traversing this area via Google Street View I noticed that the Google car has captured something I couldn’t. And because it’s rather special I thought I’d grab the images, borrowing them from Google.

As you may have noticed, when using Street View, sometimes you’ll be in the middle of a street and you’ll be looking at an image from one year, then a few metres on you’ll be in a different year. When the Google car got to the end of Sycamore Place, in 2008, it captured the Bert Keech bowling green when it was still in use, and neat, with its clubhouse at the end, behind its neatly-trimmed hedge. (These images are enlargeable.)

And then four years later, and three months or so after I passed by and took the photo of its signs but couldn’t see over the hedge, the Google car came by again, and with its camera on the roof captured the wild weediness of the green, after the bowlers had left.

His green may soon be gone, but Bert Keech’s name is remembered in the stained glass window of the nearby church of St Olave. And here on these pages, in a lovely comment on the earlier page. And perhaps, imminently, in the form of a ‘Bert Keech Mews’, or maybe — following the example of the development called ‘Bootham Green’ at the former Shipton Street School — ‘Bert’s Green’?

Bert Keech and friends remembered in a stained glass window at St Olave’s church

Update

The planning application was approved, at the council meeting on 7 August.

The meeting was webcast and is available to watch now on YouTube. Handily, there’s a list on the page of the agenda items with a link to the start of the relevant section. If you’ve got time, it’s interesting to hear what councillors say about the application, particularly bearing in mind that they see and have to decide on many applications, and have a wider perspective.

I also want to include a comment from Marc who lives nearby. I asked him if he remembered the green in use. His words can close this page, and mark the end of this chapter, for this particular piece of land.

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Dead land, carriageworks site, 27 July 2004

Ten years ago, on 27 July 2004, I walked down Holgate Road and along Poppleton Road, through the beginnings of ‘Holgate Park’. What we knew as the carriageworks site. I hated it all. The older page from back then explains why.

A week ago, on 27 July 2014, I cycled over Clifton Bridge and took a left down Poppleton Road, to the now well-established Holgate Park. One of the ‘ten years on’ visits I’ve been trying to do. A particularly important one so I made a point of revisiting on the same day, ten years on. Also, I’d heard about the Poppy Road Project, and wanted to see that, but only got half the story, and was imagining an area of red poppies, somewhere near the Fox pub. What I found was a great bright meadow of wildflowers all around the sculpture commemorating the carriageworks, part of which is shown in that image above.

Not just poppies. Multicoloured loveliness in the evening sun. It was stunning. I stopped here for much longer than I intended to.

Wildflower meadow, and rail, 27 July 2014

The wildflower meadow here was planted to commemorate the First World War, but like all good things it seems to have more meanings than just the one and will be appreciated by many people for many different reasons.

Like I said, Holgate Park and its sculpture, ten years ago, seemed like a mean little substitute for what we had, and I’ve not wanted to walk past since. It was like it had all shrunk, was soulless, compared to how vigorous and busy and industrially beautiful it was before. I feel bad saying that as I know people worked hard to regenerate the place.

It needed these flowers to regenerate it. This small part of it is transformed, inspiring, and heartening.

Here’s a 2004 view (under construction):

Holgate Arch, under construction, 27 July 2004

Here’s Google’s Street View of how it looked in 2012:

Google Street View of Holgate Arch, 2012

And here it is a week ago, in 2014:

Wildflower meadow and Holgate Arch, 27 July 2014

I know it looks so sentimental and soppy, but — the wildflower meadow around it was like a big hug for the thing, and what this place meant. I realise that the impetus for it was a First World War commemoration, but in a broader and bigger way too it’s like a part of this piece of land so changed and reduced got its heart back.

While I was up here admiring the flowers I had a wander through its sunlit arch and noticed the details that weren’t here in 2004, when it was under construction. The pathway to the arch has metal plates set into it, recording/commemorating railway companies. And then there’s a map.

Map on metal plate, Holgate Arch, 27 July 2014

I was very struck by the caption (try to ignore the weird mistake in the inverted comma):

‘The Heart of York’. It did look like a heart, this railway land, as I noticed a while back in this aerial image of the area in the Britain from Above collection (York Racecourse, the Railway Station and Railway Works, York, 1947):

A Google search turns up no written references to this area being commonly known as the ‘Heart of York’, but the metal plaque records it, and I remember it being described this way, in our recent history. More on that soon.

The way I see the area now is affected by how I remember it. A bit like that image above, but from the perspective of the top deck of a bus, going to school. My memories are no doubt a bit skewed and distorted with the years, as it’s thirty years ago, more, that I’m thinking of, remembering a long wall alongside Poppleton Road from the end of the Victorian terraces, and behind that wall the massive open area of railway land, and in particular a 1950s/60s pre-fab type building, where the apprentices trained.

One of the old Fairbank archive photos I have seems to show that very wall, though in my memory it’s a taller wall. Here on the left in an image taken about a hundred years ago. Probably just before the start of the First World War, before the streets of housing on the right were built:

Poppleton Road, circa 1913. (Fairbank archive, (c) Arup)

After I left the beautiful meadow I wended my way past CPP towards the place I was heading to originally before wildflowers distracted me. I took more photos, and had too many thoughts, and too many photos, to include on this already long page. While I was taking some of them a man I’ve never met before gave me a flower. I stuck it on my bike as I cycled away from those railway lands.

Thank you, Poppy Road Project, and the man on the gate, for putting some heart back in to the place.

. . . . .

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‘Back Linton St’, circa 1913 © Arup

Let’s take a break from current controversies and return to those sepia toned streets of a hundred years ago. We’re in one of the areas of terraced housing off Poppleton Road, just around the corner from the photo included on a recent page.

The note on the photo tells us about the way these houses were lived in back then. It’s probably well-known already, but nice to see in handwriting from that time, ‘the residents live in the kitchens. The front rooms are for show.’

These back alleys are ‘used for traffic’, in the days before motorised, fast-moving traffic. Children play and the backyards are full of washing drying on the line.

‘Back Linton St’ (alley behind Linton St), 2012 (© Google)

I think this is taken from the same end of the alleyway, but I’m not entirely sure, as these back lanes look very similar from either end. Or at least they did then. The intervening years have seen many changes, as we’d expect. Many of them a result of increased car usage. Here a garage takes up most of the old yard space.

The house on the left has had its yard wall reduced in height and an extension built. There’s a bit more greenery, including a tree or shrub growing in one of the yards. A telegraph pole’s phone wires connect to each house. A neighbourhood watch sign near the entrance to the alley reminds us that things have changed a lot since these times when you could (as people so often assert) safely leave your doors unlocked.

The most obvious feature still remaining – the stable paviours in the back alley. A hundred years ago the alley also had setts neatly laid across its entrance. These have since been removed or been lost under tarmac.

This batch of fifteen photos has a common theme, better illustrated by the notes on the later photos. The photographer appears to have been recording the state of the roads and pavements.

Number 3 photograph was taken just around the corner, on Amberley Street, the road running parallel to Linton St and its alley.

First, the 21st century view (from Google):

Amberley St, 2012 (© Google)

Any mention of Amberley Street has to include mention of the damage it sustained, and the suffering here, on the night of the Baedeker raid in 1942. It’s not obvious from this image, but if you walk down Amberley Street and look carefully at the houses you’ll notice that a few of them don’t match their 19th century neighbours. On 29 April 1942 several bombs fell on Amberley Street. Many York streets had a number of houses hit and many casualties, but Amberley Street lost the most. 14 people were killed, including a small child. Five of the casualties were from the same family.

Amberley St, c1913. © Arup

Looking peaceful and quiet, pictured decades earlier. Nothing much of note, except the curious comment.

This image, like the others, is included in the city archives online collection as (c) City of York Council – in earlier times known as ‘York Corporation’. I always thought it was a bit odd that one of their own photos had a caption with the accusation ‘Neglected by the Corporation Scavengers’.

It’s clearer now I know that these photos are part of the Fairbank archive. Fairbanks were a firm of civil engineers based in York. Obviously Mr Fairbank wasn’t too impressed with the local authority’s upkeep of this street.

‘Scavengers’ is an odd choice of word, suggesting that the Corporation had been stealing bits of paving from Amberley Street. Or perhaps Mr Fairbank was just complaining about a lack of maintenance of the road and paths. Perhaps ‘scavengers’ was used more as a general non-specific kind of insult, back then.

So much has changed over a hundred years, but in other ways it’s not that different. Back then, and now, residents of the city complain about ‘the Corporation’. This gentleman expressed his exasperation with the council in a caption on a photograph, whereas now we have Twitter.

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Linton St and Garland St, about 1913. Photo: © Arup

I’ve recently been sent a fascinating batch of old photos, taken in about 1913. Well, I think they’re fascinating. They’re ‘right up my street’, and if you live on Linton Street this one is literally right up yours.

Many of these are already online in the city archives collection, but without their handwritten captions. The captions add an extra layer of interest to these photos of mundane things, ordinary streets.

I have fifteen of them, numbered, and it seemed logical to start with number 1. Which I don’t think is included in the city archives online collection, presumably because of the writing on the photograph itself.

Why has it been written on? More on that story later.

This particular view has changed, as you might expect, in the intervening century. The mound of Severus Hill is no longer visible from here, as houses were later built on the site. In the meantime it appears to have been put to good use by the women of Garland Street and Linton Street as a convenient place to hang out their washing.

21st century view of the same:

View larger map

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