Memorial Gardens

At the weekend I had a wander in spring sunshine, beginning at the Memorial Gardens. At first glance it looks much as it did before, but I called by here as I’d read that some of the flowerbeds had been turfed over. Not perhaps that interesting in itself, but the information came from the impressively-titled ‘Update on Implementation of Recommendations from Previously Completed Goose Management Scrutiny Review’ (item 6 at this recent meeting).

Back in summer 2015 I wrote about the tatty and apparently untended ‘display’ here in this park, which seemed like a waste of money and resources. I wondered if it might be more sensible to turf over the flowerbeds instead. Nice to see that this has occurred. There’s nothing wrong with the large area of grass, it seems appropriate to me, as it’s a memorial garden for quiet reflection, and the monument in the centre is the focus of that attention.

Apparently evergreen shrubs may be planted this spring. I hope they’re planting them round the edges somewhere and not going to waste yet more of the city’s money and resources by taking up the turf recently laid.

Private businesses in the city like the nearby hotel by the station provide fabulous floral displays, so perhaps the council would be better leaving such things up to them. The council seems to be withdrawing from provision of many far more important things, so council tax payers might question investment in flowers.

The demise of the dahlias here in the gardens seems to have been blamed on the geese. The goose management strategy mentioned above referred to a couple of measures put in place here, including the installation of a gate, and also notes ‘all bedding removed’. Not, as it first seemed, a reference to goose roosts, but to the bedding plants put in the flowerbeds.

Gate or no gate, bedding or no bedding, the geese don’t care. Look at these two, happily chomping away on the new grass. The outline of the old flowerbeds is visible in the turf and its more vivid shade of green.

Geese in Memorial Gardens, March 2017

Personally I like seeing the geese, and I know I’m not alone in that. We may return to the issue of goose management another time. For now, a read of this PDF is recommended, for an insight into the time and money that has been/could be spent on trying to control geese numbers. And here’s something I wrote when first hearing of the goose scrutinising.

Let’s fly over to the nearby Tanner’s Moat, just over the other side of the bar walls. At the bottom there’s Wellington Row, and this rather fine building:

‘Hub Station’ building, Wellington Row

It was built as an electricity sub-station, but you wouldn’t know it. It’s listed. It was most recently used as the ‘Hub Station’, a base for the Bike Rescue Project. I wrote about it some years back. That project closed, sadly. There’s now a planning application submitted by the Environment Agency to use it as a public drop-in centre/exhibition space for information on flood defences in York:

17/00527/FUL | Change of use from community bike shop/workshop to public drop in centre/exhibition space with ancillary office accommodation | The Hub Station Wellington Row York YO1 6BE

This wouldn’t alter the exterior and seems to involve little change to the interior. It would be good to see the place back in use, and again accessible to the public.

Just along from that we come to North Street Gardens, where a memorial to John Snow has recently been completed. I wrote about the planning application for the memorial in November 2016.

Nicely done.

John Snow memorial, North Street gardens

Though the stone base for the pump has covered some of the grass in this area most of it remains, and seemed to be appreciated by a blackbird pecking for worms.

From here, let’s run off up to Micklegate. I haven’t been for a while, but I read recently that the ‘gentrification’ effect is becoming more noticeable. In May 2016 I wrote about the old ‘Micklegate Run’ and the changes here. Time for a quick revisit.

Nags Head, Micklegate, pub sign

Much of it looked much the same as last time I was up this way, but then I saw this handsome frontage:

Partisan, 112 Micklegate

— and wondered why I’d never noticed it before. That beautiful bluey-green glazed brick, isn’t it splendid?

It must have been covered up before, I deduced. And it seems that was the case. Google Street View helpfully confirmed my suspicion. The bricks were painted before, and this image captures their uncovering:

112 Micklegate, summer 2016 (from Google Street View)

Quite an improvement there then. And even a bit of a ‘ghost sign’ there, in the woodwork above the window, on the Partisan frontage pictured above. (More on ghost signs on this link.)

A bit further up the street, another place that has opened since I was up here last:

Brewdog, 130-134 Micklegate

I wrote about the licensing application sign in its then empty windows last year. It’s clearly now open, though its frontage looks a bit unfinished. We were trying to work out if it’s supposed to look like that. Maybe aiming for a punk kind of look, or something.

Quite a contrast to Partisan. But then Micklegate always has been a street of interesting contrasts, and I’m glad it still is.

At the top, of course, we reach Micklegate Bar and the walls. I was aiming for a particular building on nearby Toft Green. The wall walk angle on it seemed particularly alluring on this sunny afternoon, so up the steps we go to meet the treetops — well, the tree sides — and the buds about to open:

About to open its buds: tree by the bar walls

I was intending to write about a new planning application for Hudson House for this week’s page, but got distracted by all these other things on the way. So instead I’ll leave you with the delightfully distracting daffs I looked down on from the walls by the station. Happy springtime everyone.

Daffodils in bloom on the walls by the station

I’m at present adding a page a week to yorkstories.co.uk, publishing on Thursdays. If you’d like notifications of new additions you can join the mailing list or follow me on Twitter.

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By the Ouse, 4 July 2007. I’ve been admiring the geese for some years now.

Honk, honk, honky tonk …

Geese, allegedly a problem, were discussed at yesterday’s City of York Council Executive meeting — this link to 49 mins in should take you directly to it. Some people see them as a problem and they appear to have complained regularly to their councillors, so as those elected members have to respond to that in some visible way, money is to be spent finding out where the geese nest, and counting them, and that kind of thing. A vociferous minority may favour more aggressive methods, so perhaps some of us might want to keep an eye on this and not get complacent. It’s my understanding that the majority don’t see the geese as a problem at all. But it was interesting to hear this issue being discussed.

Museum Gardens, free access

Also at the Executive meeting, councillor Andy D’Agorne raised a point I’d been wondering about in a page earlier this week, regarding the Museum Gardens and free public access to it, and whether the citizens of York (to whom it was ‘transferred’, decades back) would retain that right.

If legal agreements are being drawn up then these details matter. I hope that legal experts who are truly independent are scrutinising all of this, as the land and assets transferred to ‘the citizens’ are now part of a far more complex world, where local authorities no longer control and administer the city’s valuable assets in a straightforward and easily understandable way.

Cllr D’Agorne’s question is at 1 hr 38, approx: this link should take you to the relevant part of the webcast.

And bridges …

The York Press website has recently included some fascinating photo galleries, images from the paper’s archives on various themes. This week they’ve included a selection of photographs of bridges. More interesting than it sounds, as it includes several photos of bridges since removed or replaced, including the ‘glass bridge’ over the railway line between the football ground and the hospital which I know some readers remember, and the gasworks bridge over the Foss. View the photos on this link.

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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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Geese near the Memorial Gardens, by the Ouse, 5 April 2006

On this day ten years ago I was walking by the river, presumably on my way into town or back from town, and I stopped to take a few photos of geese wandering on the grass by the railings of the Memorial Gardens. The only photos I took that particular day. Eight photos of a group of geese, apparently a family of geese.

Now, in 2016, the council has something called the Goose Management Scrutiny Review Task Group. It appears to have been set up in recent months.

Every now and then there are letters to the York Press about the droppings of geese in Rowntree Park and other places. And presumably there’s also been a fair amount of lobbying of councillors on this issue for a Goose Management Scrutiny Review Task Group to be set up.

I like the geese, enjoy the sight and sound of them in the riverside areas, and when they fly over my neighbourhood on their way to the river. They leave a bit of mess on the riverside, but not half as much as we do, and goose poo breaks down naturally whereas plastic bottles and the other rubbish we leave doesn’t.

Anyway, if you’d like to read more about geese and what the city council might be doing to control their numbers, here are some links to the information on the council’s website. There’s also a PDF of the reports pack from a meeting on 3 March, which should tell you everything you ever wanted to know about geese and their ‘management’. Including painting grass with chemicals, which seems to be favoured:

Officers confirmed they would be interested in a free trial of chemicals to use on grassed areas, details of which were tabled at the meeting. The Chair agreed he would contact the chemical companies to see if they would be willing to provide the Council with a free sample. It was suggested that a test area could then be identified, possibly in Memorial Gardens, to test if the chemicals were effective.

(Source)

Chemicals on the grass … mmm … anyone else a bit concerned? Personally I’d rather take my chances with the goose poo.

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