Carlton Tavern, October 2017. If you owned this, would you want to demolish it?

Time to return to the Holgate/Acomb area, to the Carlton Tavern. If the current planning application (17/00476/FULM) is approved at a meeting this week then the applicants will have permission to demolish the building.

The planning committee meeting is at 4.30pm on Wednesday 18 October. Further details on this link.

I wrote about the building back in March, when the planning application was submitted. Since then there has been an impressive campaign against the proposed demolition.

It’s not only about local residents and heritage organisations wanting to save the building, but also, more recently, interesting ideas for its future use have been put forward which would make more use of the building, for the benefit of the local community.

Seems obvious really, doesn’t it, that in 2017 we shouldn’t be destroying handsome Victorian buildings when they could be reused and appreciated.

But it’s more complicated than that. So many angles we could approach this from, but let’s start with this angle — a bit of the front of the building.

Carlton Tavern, detail

Handsome, isn’t it. I wonder how long it took to attach these tiles in this pattern. I wonder how long it will take to destroy this pattern, and the rest of the building with it. I wonder if these tiles will be salvaged and sold on, or just slung into a skip, all broken. Then there’s the bricks, the slates, the handsome windows, the impressive conservatory, all the internal joinery, all that work by the Victorian builders and joiners and craftsmen.

Carlton Tavern and conservatory

I can’t help but think about another large Victorian villa on my side of town, also the focus of a campaign to save it from demolition, more than a decade back. Burton Croft, on Burton Stone Lane. In that case, as in this, if planning permission is granted, to the developers the building is just an object to be cleared, from ‘Land Acquired’.

Burton Croft, Clifton, 20 Nov 2004

Burton Croft, like the Carlton Tavern, was originally built as a family home. Both had a second life as a care home. The Carlton Tavern was for many decades the Godfrey Walker home for children, as previously discussed. Burton Croft, a BUPA-owned facility, was one of quite a few smaller residential care homes for the elderly that closed in the early years of the 21st century.

A lack of care

There’s a bigger picture here of course — the lack of care home provision. Following on from the closure of smaller care homes, cuts to council funding have led to the closure of the larger council care homes, including Oak Haven, a couple of doors down from the Carlton Tavern. So it’s over to the private sector to provide these facilities. Clearly there’s a bit of a panic about how and where older and vulnerable residents of the city are going to live when in need of care. Crown Care appeared and put forward these plans for a care home for the Acomb/Holgate area.

Just a shame that the site they chose has the Carlton Tavern in the middle of it.

The pub company who own it want to make profit from selling it to a care home company, and the care home company doesn’t care about the handsomeness of the building or its use to the local community because it just wants the site cleared for its new build.

Thinking about Burton Croft, mentioned above, I did a quick bit of Googling for more information on the care home industry in recent years. According to a Yorkshire Post article from April 2002 the closure of Burton Croft and other care homes back then followed ‘complaints from private sector homes that fees paid by local authorities are too low while they have also been expected to upgrade standards to meet new regulations.’ Apparently these problems continue in the care home industry. It’s an industry ‘in crisis’, according to a report in the Guardian earlier this year.

Should a building that has managed to survive for over 130 years be cleared out of the way to provide what might only be a short-term gain, in what seems to be a rather precarious care home industry?

Still, Crown Care are confident in their plans for this development. On their website their list of ‘new developments’ includes one in York — presumably the Carlton Tavern site — despite the fact that the planning application hasn’t yet been approved.

Whether it will be approved or refused is ultimately up to a group of local elected representatives to decide — our local councillors on the planning committee. Crown Care don’t care about the value of the existing building to the local community, but York councillors should.

In the balance

In planning terms, as always, the planning officers have to weigh these things up in terms of perceived ‘harm’ and ‘benefit’, and then recommend that councillors either approve it or refuse it.

The report prepared for the decision meeting this week recommends approval:

In conclusion … the overall judgement is balanced. Nevertheless it is considered that the significant benefits which the Care home would provide would be sufficient to outweigh loss of a non –designated heritage asset, even one of the undoubted local importance of the Carlton Tavern, and furthermore would outweigh the loss of a listed Asset of Community Value. It is considered that the possible harm to part of the root zone of the nearest tree to create the lift platform is not sufficient to weigh in favour of refusal in its own.
– Committee report (PDF)

I’m sorry, I’m not convinced, having read the committee report, and the many objections.

As the report mentions possible harm to one of the trees on the site, let’s have a look at the roots of the fine old mature trees at the front of the site. I was rather impressed by them.

Hanging on in there, trees in front of the Carlton Tavern

They’re a really impressive feature on the driveway to the pub.

Trees and their roots, Carlton Tavern entrance

The plans appear to retain the trees, but presumably there will be damage to the roots of some of them once the work starts on digging out the site and putting foundations in for the new building. According to the committee report ‘the trees have good vitality and are likely to respond to any loss of roots with regeneration of new root tissue.’ ‘Likely to’ doesn’t mean ‘will’.

The committee report also mentions that bats live in the building:

Dusk and dawn activity surveys were undertaken in June and July 2017. This concluded that the public house currently supports small numbers of roosting Common Pipistrelle bats, which emerged from under the wooden fascia on the north eastern elevation. Due to the number of old droppings found within the roof space a maternity roost may have been previously present (and therefore could be again in future years)

(- but not if the building is pulled down.)

They’ll have to be evicted and perhaps settle for a nest box in one of the trees. They don’t get any say in the matter.

But the locals should get a say, and be listened to. After all, the sign at the entrance proudly declares: ‘Your Community, Your Pub’.

Carlton Tavern sign: ‘Your Community, Your Pub’

Nice cosy advertising slogan, giving customers a nice warm glow and a feeling of ownership. All nonsense, of course, as the proposed sale of the site and demolition of the building shows.

Good to see though that the local community has a sense of ownership and has campaigned against the closure.

Louise Ennis, Carlton Tavern campaigner and local resident explains:

“This isn’t just an empty building plot. It contains a much-loved local landmark which also happens to be an Asset of Community Value and a heritage asset with significance for the history and character of the local area. It’s also on the Local Heritage List which would be taken into account by planning decision makers if the York Local Plan was in force. It would be sad indeed if this important survival was lost to future generations – like neighbouring Shelley House, and Burnholme, both recently demolished for development – because bad timing meant reduced protection.

Historic buildings matter to communities. The Carlton Tavern, or West Garth makes a huge contribution to Acomb and Holgate both architecturally and aesthetically, but it also matters to local people, giving continuity to their lives, and memories of visiting, working or living at the Godfrey Walker Home for Children which held a central place in Acomb life from the 1940s to the 1980s.

West Garth also tells us so much about the development of this affluent York suburb of Holgate where York’s civic leaders built their Victorian and Edwardian villas just outside the city walls. The first owner was Lieut. Col. Arthur H. Russell and his family. West Garth has been attributed by local heritage experts to celebrated York architect Walter Green Penty, whose firm Penty & Penty designed Elmbank on The Mount and Tudoresque Aldersyde on Tadcaster Road, as well as buildings in Hampstead Garden Suburbs.

It’s not just national and local heritage experts, from York Civic Trust, and York Conservation Trust, to the Victorian Society that think the Carlton should be saved. It’s part of the shared history of our community. Having spoken to hundreds of residents over the past few months, I know that I truly represent local people when I say that they do not want to lose this building.”

I mentioned Burton Croft earlier on. To end this piece, a couple of photos of that Victorian building as it ended up — in heaps of broken slate and brick and timber. Twelve years on from that particular destruction, I hope we can do better in the case of the Carlton Tavern.

Burton Croft demolition, 5 Feb 2005

A heap of slates and bricks: Burton Croft demolition, 5 Feb 2005

Further information

Members of the public are welcome to attend the planning committee meetings at West Offices. The Carlton Tavern application is first up on the agenda at the meeting starting 4.30pm on Wednesday 18 October. Campaigners for the Carlton Tavern would I’m sure welcome further public support.

Members of the public can also attend the site visit, along with the councillors who will decide the issue, on the morning of Tuesday 17 October. See this PDF for details of timings.

Objections to the application can still be registered but at this late stage any further representations will be reported as numbers only, so don’t spend time writing a long essay in objection. The committee report has been written and includes a summary of objections received so far.

The meeting will also be webcast — ‘council telly’, as we call it in our house — to watch live, or later. Should be an interesting discussion.

. . . . .

I’m continuing to add to this online ‘resident’s record of York and its changes‘ as often as I can. If you’d like to be notified when new pages appear here, please sign up to my mailing list, or follow me on Twitter.

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Godfrey Walker Home, Acomb Road, Nov 1948 (Photo: York Press)

A recent story in the Press announced plans for the closure and demolition of the Carlton Tavern, on Acomb Road. Many large out of town pubs have closed in recent years, several have been demolished. But this isn’t just another pub closure story. The building has a long and interesting history, part of which is captured in this photo above, from 1948. Calling it the Carlton Tavern doesn’t do it justice. Let’s call it by one of its older names: West Garth perhaps, or the Godfrey Walker Home.

As one of the comments on the Press article mentions, before it was a pub this Victorian villa was for some decades the Godfrey Walker Home. The photo at the top of the page was taken during that time, and shows nursery nurses and children on the lawns and steps in front of the building.

This building was the reason my mum came to York, from Hull, just after the war. It was her first home here, for a year or so, 1947-8. A description of this time, written in the early 1990s as a contribution to a life story project run by the British Library, includes a page or two about the home and her time there. I thought I’d share a few extracts. Imagine, if you will, leaving the bombed-out streets of Hull, just after the war, and arriving in York, in the merry month of May, 1947:

I applied for a job as a nursery nurse with the Church of England Children’s Society. I received a letter telling me that there was a place in Shropshire, but they would try to find me one nearer home. I wrote back and told them that I had no desire to be near Hull, on the contrary the farther away the better.

In York at this time a large detached house in its own grounds had been bequeathed to the society. This was to be opened in May ’47 as a nursery for babies and toddlers up to five years. It was named after the benefactor, and known as the Godfrey Walker Home. I was offered a place here although I was only fifteen and a half. When I was sixteen, in August, I could start a two year nursery nurse course which would include two three month periods at a college in Hornsey, North London.

I arrived in York on a glorious day in May and asked a policeman the way to Acomb. As I walked out of the station I thought I had come to paradise. Brilliant blue sky, white stone walls, green grass and trees. I’d left behind rubble and debris, sandbags and all the reminders of war. I boarded a bus and the journey took me past lilac and laburnum all in their full glory. Past the park with trees of many varieties until I finally walked up the path towards my new home.

There were about six of us altogether. Girls like myself, leaving home for the first time; also one sister and a Matron. Soon the children began to arrive; babies and toddlers from all over the country.

Our wages were £2 a month. Out of this we paid a stamp of 7/6 so we had 32/6d left. Thankfully we were provided with a uniform; a green and white striped dress with a white hat and apron. I wore mine constantly. My underwear had to be washed out and dried ready to put back on the next day. Trying to buy clothing was difficult because I had to buy soap and toothpaste and so on. When the girls asked me to go out with them, maybe rowing on the river or something, I would refuse, then they would insist, and I’d have to say I had nothing to wear. One would then lend me a blouse and another a skirt.

We gave the children their tea in the playroom. Here I had my first taste of honey. We had large jars of it which was spread on brown bread and relished by all. We worked hard but it was enjoyable. Just to live in such a lovely house surrounded by a garden and in such a beautiful city was a constant pleasure.

Mum had left this employment before the photo above was taken, but she stayed in Acomb.

These photos of the building I think date from the 1990s:

Former Godfrey Walker Home, 1990s

Former Godfrey Walker Home, 1990s

I haven’t any recent photos of it available, but Google Street view has an image of it, from 2016:

Google Street View image, June 2016 (view on Google maps)

It’s a rather attractive Victorian villa, dating from the late 1880s, according to a brief mention in the Pevsner guide. (It refers to it together with Shelley House, another tile-hung Victorian villa next door. That has been demolished and replaced with a modern block of flats.) It was originally called West Garth, and available records show that it was the home of the Russell family for some years, towards the end of the 19th century.

How it then changed ownership and came to be the Godfrey Walker Home is something perhaps someone else can investigate further. For now it seems sufficient to observe that it looks not much altered, externally, even apparently keeping its original windows (though hard to be sure without a closer look). Unusual perhaps for a building that has had so many changes of use, and isn’t a listed building.

The article in the Press this week revealed that there are plans to demolish the building and replace it with a new purpose-built care home. Plans which apparently received a largely positive response at a recent consultation/exhibition to which some local residents were invited. (But then people exhibiting plans for redevelopment always say that the reaction is positive.)

Seems a shame to destroy this building. In fact I’d go so far as to use a phrase I’m not in the habit of using except when I really need to: it seems like an act of vandalism to destroy it.

I’m not thinking particularly of my own family connection to the place, and this interesting aspect of its history, but more that it makes no sense to me to destroy a solid-looking handsome building that has been adapted for several different uses over the last 130 years or so and yet still retains so much of its original character.

Why could it not be kept, with a modern development around it? If it has outlived its usefulness as a pub that doesn’t seem sufficient justification for its complete destruction.

I’m not naive, and realise that for companies owning ‘assets’ like this it’s all about how much profit they can make.

Maybe they could make just a bit less, by adapting what’s already there, and leave the entrance to Acomb with at least one characterful handsome old building. ‘The next few hundred yards and the blasted village entrance have little aesthetic appeal’, wrote John Hutchinson in 1980.

Technically I think the building is in Holgate, as the boundary between Acomb and Holgate is at Acomb Regent, just along the road, so I’ve been told many times.

Whether we think of it as in Acomb or in Holgate, whether we call it the Carlton Tavern or West Garth or the former Godfrey Walker Home — should it go the same way as the 19th century Burnholme WMC building, and Burton Croft, and North Lodge at Clifton, and the lodge at the old fire station, and so many other Victorian buildings demolished in the last decade or so?

A planning application and planning permission will of course be needed. I can’t see any sign as yet of a planning application on the online system, but I’ll look out for it and link to it when it does.

There’s more information on the Godfrey Walker Home in the online catalogue of the records of the Children’s Society, on this link.

Update: planning application

Now open for comment:

17/00476/FULM | Erection of three-four storey 79no. bedroom care home with associated parking, cycle racks and landscaping following demolition of existing public house | The Carlton Tavern 140 Acomb Road York YO24 4HA

. . . . .

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Borage for the bees, in a Holgate community garden

Earlier this week I had a wander over to Holgate, via Cinder Lane. Something I’ve done fairly often. But the specific target for this particular walk was a place I don’t think I’ve been to since one visit twenty years ago — a small park, at the end of Upper St Paul’s Terrace and Cleveland Street, at the edge of the housing in Holgate.

On that day back in the mid-1990s I took a lot of photos of the railway land around here, presumably in connection with the closure of the carriageworks. The collection of prints from that film includes a few of this park/play area. I’m not sure why I took them. There are several of the graffiti on the walls, and also this one, a wider view:

Since the mid-1990s the place has changed quite a lot, as I found when I visited it this week. Part of the land has been reshaped and remodelled into a garden.

It’s now full of greenery and flowers. Planted against the wall and in raised beds in the central area.

Upper St Paul’s, community garden, 16 June 2016

There’s still a piece of play equipment in the middle, but it’s surrounded by a thick soft layer of wood chippings. Around it a profusion of blooms and greenery, ornamental and edible, herbs and vegetables.

Community garden at the end of Upper St Paul’s Terrace and Cleveland St, 16 June 2016

I came to visit because of an email received a few days earlier from a local resident, alerting me to a campaign group and a Facebook page set up because of concerns about the future of this place.

A pleasant place to sit. 16 June 2016

The Edible York website includes a page on the garden, which is apparently quite new, first planted only a couple of years ago. That the future of the garden is uncertain is recognised in the text:

We had significant funding for fruit trees in place in March 2014, but have been told by the Council we are not allowed to plant any trees on the site until the planning is finalised for a proposed road and bridge that may cut through the park to create access for development of the York Central site.

The access road/bridge for the York Central development, which, as previously mentioned, looks likely to be taking a course from what was the old carriageworks entrance on Holgate Road.

I’d concentrated on the fact that a road at this location would destroy the carriageworks canteen building, and completely missed the fact that it would also involve the destruction of a local park and garden.

Benefiting the bees, and us, 16 June 2016

There’s a basketball court at the far end of the site, at the bottom of the slope. At the edge of that, behind steel fencing, the carriageworks site, and between them quite a thick belt of vegetation, including mature trees. This area isn’t accessible, but I managed to get my camera through the gaps in the fence:

Trees and other greenery, edge of the carriageworks site, June 2016

All this too appears to be in the way of the access road/bridge, so would also be destroyed, I assume.

We’re told that nothing has been decided. The Press today reported on the campaigners wanting to save the park, and the response from the council:

Neil Ferris, director of city and environmental services at City of York Council, said: “no final decision has been made on site access, and detailed road designs have yet to be approved. We are working through all likely impacts of the scheme as a whole which will be informed by further community consultation and technical assessment.”

Yet plans for the access road/bridge have been reported several times in recent years, and all available information indicated that the road would run from Chancery Rise (carriageworks entrance), past the end of Cleveland Street, that is, right where I was standing to take the photo above.

When the news of a proposed access road/bridge was announced it was hailed as a breakthrough by the then council leader James Alexander, and presented as the key to unlocking the site. Comments on the Press articles about it revealed that although Cllr Alexander thought we’d all been discussing it for years, many readers were confused about the proposals, wanted clearer plans and information, and couldn’t find it. See ‘Further information’, below, for the relevant links.

The strange thing is, just a little further along Holgate Road, next to a cleared space, there’s already the beginning of a road, looking like it’s heading in towards the York Central site:

Aerial view of roads at Holgate Park, Holgate Road

Perhaps someone else can explain why that can’t be used instead, rather than a new road/bridge which will involve the demolition of a heritage asset and the destruction of a much-loved local park. Meanwhile I’m off to sit in the park and look at some more flowers.

Foxglove in the community garden, Upper St Paul’s, 16 June 2016

More information

Campaigners fight to save York community garden and play area (Press, 18 June 2016)

The Facebook page for the campaign group can be found on this link (Facebook login may be required).

Google map – aerial view showing the location of the garden and play area (green markers) and former carriageworks canteen (blue marker)

This access road/bridge has been reported on in the Press and in Steve Galloway’s blog a fair few times in recent years, going back to 2011:

York North West development – transport arrangements published (but hidden from residents) – 30 Nov 2011. Includes mention of the proposed Chancery Rise access road/bridge

York Central access routes discussed – from Dringhouses and Woodthorpe Liberal Democrats, March 2012. Includes an image of a possible route. Also foresees trouble ahead:

Residents will expect (and need) informed consultation with choices. There is a major possibility of confrontation with some Leeman Road/Holgate Road residents if they are not given more information quickly and in an accessible format

Cleveland Street residents raise concerns about “bridge to nowhere” – reported Steve Galloway’s blog on 30 Nov 2013.

£10m approved for York ‘teardrop’ bridge (Press, Dec 2013) – ‘Work on the first new homes could start in 2015′, it reported. ‘Coun Alexander said the access point may not be permanent, but will mean construction traffic could enter the site for the development’s opening stages’. The comments on this piece are as interesting as the story itself, and worth a read. Many people asking for a clear plan of the proposed bridge/road, for example. We’ve had the York Central consultation since, so perhaps it’s all clear now … or perhaps not.

£10m bridge giving access to “teardrop” site could be built in 2016 reported the Press, in April 2014.

An interesting document from March last year (PDF) – a land disposal notice regarding the sale of part of the Network Rail land alongside the play area and garden.

Update, September 2017

There’s a consultation on the access road running at present, it closes 13 September. For this and other recent updates on the York Central development and its impact, see this link.

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I’m sure we’re all eagerly awaiting the carefully collated results of the York Central consultation, which, the consultation information pictured above told us, was ‘SEEKING YOUR VIEWS TO GUIDE DEVELOPMENT’.

On that image above, number 25 is a building called Alliance House. I don’t have any photos of it, but I want to use Alliance House to make a couple of points, which tie in to themes we’re perhaps familiar with on these pages.

Wasn’t it nice to read that the local authority and its partners really wanted to hear from residents on the York Central plans. It was almost convincing in some ways, this apparently genuine interest in the views of citizens ‘guiding development’.

Rather suprising then that at the same time as the consultation opened, Network Rail had submitted a planning application to demolish one of the buildings we were apparently being asked about. The application to demolish it was submitted on 25 Jan and validated by City of York Council on 11 Feb. The ‘consultation’ opened on 18 Jan and closed on 18 Feb (extended from the original deadline of 15 Feb).

I’ve already written about how alienating and annoying it was to see that the remaining carriageworks buildings and in particular the canteen building weren’t included in the numbered list/key of important buildings. Alliance House, the other remnant of the carriageworks site, did get a number and a mention in the list. But Network Rail were at the same time putting the paperwork through to demolish it, an application validated by City of York Council, who were simultaneously trying to convince citizens that this was a proper consultation about the York Central site and that our views were really important.

Local authorities make a big thing about consultation. It’s all got to look right, and give us the illusion that we’re valued citizens and not just people paying council tax to prop it all up. If there is a consultation many of us feel like we really should make the effort to engage, while simultaneously knowing that the powers that be really don’t care much because most of it has already been decided.

So here we are, with Alliance House illustrating that.

Network Rail, who submitted the application, and City of York Council, who received it, are partners in the York Central scheme. So it’s all sewn up already really isn’t it, and so much so that I don’t know why they bothered to put number 25 on their heritage plan.

It also needs to be said that this place called Alliance House has no personal meaning to me, and that my concern is the buildings nearby, and the way that the imminent demolition of this one has been handled.

Caring about heritage isn’t about wanting to preserve every old building just because it’s old. Some buildings, while they stand, stand for something bigger, for a shared knowing and memory, remind us of family, or the culture of a time and place. So the carriageworks canteen building stands for that, because it was part of the entrance to the carriageworks. For me, Alliance House doesn’t have any associations, except that it was part of the carriageworks site. But so much of that has been cleared already.

But … thank goodness for the Conservation Areas Advisory Panel. Who, in their wisdom and knowledge, lodged a comment on this application to demolish, recognising this building as part of a dwindling site, part of a place deserving of more respect and recognition than it gets:

the Panel is concerned at the gradual nibbling away of buildings on the site, without any overall plan having been prepared, and feel this should be done prior to any further demolition.

Source: comment on application 16/00175/DMNOT (PDF)

The application is still open for comment (ref: 16/00175/DMNOT), so if you’d like to raise any of the points made above, or indeed any other points, I hope you’ll feel it’s worthwhile to do so. But if you can’t be bothered and have better things to do with your time, fair enough, so do I. As long as we’re all aware that heritage isn’t just about pretty stuff, and that ‘consultation’ is so often just something to make local authorities look like they’re doing the right thing, while it seems that things are decided just as they always were.

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Carriageworks canteen, Holgate Rd, 27 July 2014

The consultation on the York Central site has been difficult to address on these pages, but I felt some kind of responsibility to try to do that. I’ve found it exhausting and disheartening, in general, but have kept going out of some kind of weird sense of civic duty. With mixed feelings. On the one hand it seems really important, on the other hand I sense that there’s not a lot of public interest and realise that most of this has been decided already.

And then there’s the rather startling difference in views in our ways of seeing the site to begin with. A recent piece in the Press included this comment:

Cllr Sonja Crisp, Lord Mayor of York and Holgate councillor said: “We have a clean slate here, so if you have any ideas as to what to do with the place, say them. Once it is done, it is done.”

(York Press article)

The last sentence is correct: once it’s done, it’s done.

The first part of the statement is nonsense.

Nowhere in built-up York is a ‘clean slate’, and the York Central site most definitely isn’t.

A different way of seeing it, my way of seeing it, is reflected in comments by the Conservation Area Advisory Panel in a document from 2011:

‘The surviving fabric on the York Central site represents a significant proportion of all York’s industrial heritage’

And we’ve demolished more of that fabric since then.

Carriageworks canteen, December 2011

But over on Holgate Road are the much-reduced remains of what was the carriageworks site. And one of the reasons I’ve found the York Central consultation documents so difficult and challenging to engage with is that their representation of the ‘heritage’ makes those buildings essentially invisible. (Or perhaps they’ve been demolished already and no one noticed.)

Everything else has a number and note in the key. The carriageworks, and the canteen building that once formed part of its entrance, they’re not highlighted at all. Why is that?

I’ve realised for a long while that the powers that be have been plotting how to get access to the site, to ‘unlock’ the development, and bringing in some kind of bridge straight through the middle of the old carriageworks canteen is the way they’ve already decided to do it. I don’t know why they couldn’t bring the road in over the grassed area to the west of the carriageworks buildings, but this consultation doesn’t offer that option.

I’ll be honest, when I looked at these plans at the end of last year and when I’ve looked at them every time since, I’ve felt like this is another example of how alienating and unpleasant 21st century York can feel at times. Deciding to demolish heritage assets of community value and significance without asking the community if they mind is one thing, but trying to gloss that over by not bothering to acknowledge that the buildings even exist is … well, appalling and depressing.

It’s like the King’s Square consultation, which if I recall took a similar approach to the mulberry tree on the raised area. Already doomed, so they didn’t bother to ask, they’d already decided.

I/we saved that tree, but I doubt I/we can save the carriageworks canteen, even though it’s a more attractive building than anything they’ll build now, and with more cultural and historical significance than any road that will replace it.

I’ve got no good feelings about the York Central proposals as they stand. I also doubt that anything I say will have much impact, and perhaps that applies to most of us. But this ‘heart of York’ deserves attention, so I’ve done my best, in a heavy-hearted kind of way. I suspect that the site will a) have much of its heritage and meaning destroyed and b) will be filled with office blocks they’ll find it hard to fill and … well, if you’re still reading and are still interested, I’m intending to email a condensed version of all this as a comment, tomorrow, and will share it on this site so anyone can cut and paste bits of it they agree with, if they’d like to.

Further information

Comments can be made via email to: yorkcentral@york.gov.uk and more information can be found at www.york.gov.uk/yorkcentral. If you’d prefer to give your views via the online questionnaire it’s on this link. Deadline for comment is midnight on 18 February.

On the council’s website, in the list of ‘character statements’ for the suburban areas of York, read this, number 31 on this list, on the significance of the buildings in the area. From that:

The canteen buildings (1888) at these works have been nominated for inclusion on the Local List of Heritage Assets as the last remaining social building in the carriage works complex.

… Social value relating to the railway area as a whole cannot be over emphasised as thousands of employees past and present will have a connection to the buildings

and see the ‘Related posts’, below, leading to other pages on this site.

Though it appears to be a waste of time, this page, as so few people care and those voices that do don’t reach and break through the dominant narrative, York as it is now.

But there will be more interest no doubt when numerous individual lives are inconvenienced by the horrendous congestion on Holgate Road as a result of this new road and the construction-related traffic. Which will be much worse, far more polluting, than all those men on bikes leaving the carriageworks, which some of us remember.

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I dashed across York yesterday, trying to get to Lowther Terrace before the sun set, after David Bower’s comment on the Holgate Villa page regarding an old boundary stone. Here it is. Demolition of the wall it’s on is underway, and it’s partially obscured by metal fencing, but I did my best.

As David mentioned, the first line is still fairly clear, YNMR — York and North Midland Railway (there may also be a ‘&’ between the Y and the N?).

The line underneath says ‘Boundary’, in lower case. The first and last letters and the upright on the ‘d’ are fairly clear still.

This was of course the boundary, or one of them, for the huge area of railway land stretching from here to Leeman Road and up Poppleton Road to the north. ‘The heart of York‘ once.

Before that, the second line perhaps begins with ‘Cos’. This isn’t that clear on the thing itself, but searching online brought me this result for what sounds like a similar boundary stone, part of the collection at the NRM, not far away.

I’m probably being a bit dim but I’ve got no idea what ‘Cos’ means in this context. The only Cos I can think of is lettuce.

Comments and insights welcome, as always.

A stone’s throw away, near the railway car park and the Railway Institute buildings, is another old structure associated with the York and North Midland Railway, also bearing the initials YNM. Or it did, when I looked a couple of years ago. It was looking rather rusty and the letters may have dropped off since.

This old stone, sooty and worn, will one day be completely unreadable. It might not survive the demolition work. I could find no other record of it online, so I’m glad we’ve got one here. Thanks to David for drawing my attention to it.

Update: another example

Thanks to John McGoldrick for this photo of a less eroded YNMR boundary stone. It was part of the Clapham collection and pre-dates York’s NRM, so there’s no information on where it came from originally.

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