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

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Micklegate, on the evening of 7 May 2016, at around 7.30pm, quiet and sedate

It’s a sunny Saturday in May. While I’m sitting here all quiet and thoughtful, wondering whether to do the planned page on a particular planning application, town will be filling up with people. Some of them perhaps in large rowdy groups, already drink-fuelled and looking for more. Some perhaps in the Micklegate area. Though not when I took the photo above, in a very quiet Micklegate at around 7.30 this evening.

We’ve touched on this subject before, most recently a week or so ago. As it’s in the news again this weekend — with a Teesside paper running a poll asking its readers Can Teessiders be trusted to abide by York ‘code of conduct?’  — let’s bravely take on the town centre and investigate the ‘drinking culture’. Let’s have a heated debate over a pint. Or a polite well-mannered discussion over a cup of tea. And perhaps wonder if the whole thing has got a bit over-inflated, like some of those gigantic willies seen on the streets, and if it’s really as bad as the press coverage suggests.

Harm? Or just offence?

I’ve never had a hen party, never been on one, don’t want to go on one. The whole stag and hen thing baffles me. I’m looking on with a mixture of bemusement and occasional amusement. The police do their best to control the situation in a measured way by requesting the deflating of inappropriate inflatables and national papers discuss our problem with gigantic willies. Yet some people find it very offensive and apparently quite serious. I’m trying to understand why.

Like the geese, the stags and hens have a Task Group to scrutinise them. Interesting that isn’t it. There was a report (PDF) which may be of interest. It includes findings which may seem to be obvious, such as that providing more toilets might be a good idea.

How many people have to complain about something for it to be seen as a problem requiring special attention, I wonder. I wonder how many people, the silent majority perhaps, just accept that occasional inconveniences and moments of being slightly offended or shocked are all part of life’s rich and varied tapestry.

I have seen, in town on Saturday afternoons and evenings, various sights that have made me raise my eyebrows in surprise, then look away to find something more pleasant to look at. A middle-aged woman vomiting into a sick bag while her hen party friends gathered round. Walking into St Helen’s Square from Lendal to see a man holding one of those inflatable dolls in front of him and having simulated sex with it, while his friends laughed. I was a bit shocked/surprised, momentarily, but carried on across the square, no harm done.

Being offended isn’t the same as being harmed. That seems an important point. I didn’t think those things should be controlled/banned/driven from the streets/have a Task Group scrutinise them.

And it’s not all grim and ugly anyway. Memorable entertainment was provided on one Saturday afternoon by one of the hen parties dancing in the street on Spurriergate to music provided by a group of buskers. The energetic and bouncy singing along and dancing had drawn quite a crowd, but particularly splendid was the fact that the women in the hen party were dressed in Dalmatian-spotted ‘onesies’. It was one of the daftest and most cheering things I’ve seen in the centre of York on a Saturday afternoon. Spontaneous and joyous and causing no harm at all, and brightening my day, in fact.

Inappropriate inflatables

The large inflatable penises seem to cause particular offence. Why? Isn’t it just silly, bawdy, done in the same kind of spirit as those old saucy seaside postcards we now get nostalgic about?

In summer 2015, when this subject was receiving a lot of attention, David Dunning shared a photo on Twitter of a group of women heading towards Micklegate Bar carrying a large inflatable. It’s on this link if you’d like to see it, but please don’t look if you’d be offended.

The huge joke phallus, held aloft, about to enter an opening of our city’s defences, was an interesting image, and the reactions to it were equally interesting. It made me smile. It upset other observers. I wondered why. Perhaps provoking some ancestral memory of invaders storming the city? ‘Quick, there’s a huge group of women at the gates, holding an inappropriate inflatable, shut the gates! Lower the portcullis!’

It made me think of Chaucer and the Wife of Bath and medieval bawdiness, and the grittiness that is as much a part of the life and heritage of this city as its prettiness. The focus on its prettiness is a fairly recent thing. Personally I don’t want a genteel middle-class monoculture.

The phallus-wielding women were pictured at Micklegate Bar, perhaps about to start the Micklegate Run. Which, conveniently, leads us on to …

‘Reclaiming’ the Micklegate Run

When I wrote the earlier page about this street and the cultural shifts apparently happening here I was aware of an event planned for this summer, a soapbox challenge. What hadn’t registered was that organisers have called it The Micklegate Run. Traditionally applied to an aspect of the local ‘drinking culture’.

Poster for the ‘soapbox challenge’ ‘Micklegate Run’

This is a clever idea. I wonder which came first, the event idea or that they wanted to have an event they could apply this name to. Further reading, of a York Mix article from last autumn, makes explicit the wish to ‘reclaim’ the street’s reputation, to make it the ‘great street’ it once was.

The use of the word ‘reclaim’ really stands out. Reclaiming is only necessary when there’s a feeling that something formerly or rightfully belonging to a particular group has been controlled or appropriated by some other group. Usually a more powerful group.

Not sure that applies here, but it’s an interesting cultural shift/conflict/question.

Those rowdy visitors come with a lot of money in their pockets, and it ends up benefiting many local businesses.

They tend to visit at weekends. The rest of the time Micklegate seems relatively quiet and genteel. Room for everyone, surely?

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Licensing application document in Micklegate window, reflecting The Priory pub opposite, April 2016

Today’s photo is of a licensing application document in a window on Micklegate. The window also reflects The Priory, a pub on the opposite side of the road, near the entrance to Priory Street.

When I started these pages site notices about planning applications seemed to be stuck up on lamp posts and the like everywhere I walked. There are still a lot of those around of course, but they seem to have been joined in recent years by an increasing number of documents relating to licensing applications, as more pubs, bars and restaurants open.

This one’s in the window of a large empty shop near the top of Micklegate, which is soon to be a Brewdog bar. I probably wouldn’t have given any thought to this, or stopped to take this photo, if it wasn’t for the recent Press coverage of a court battle over the licensing application.

Micklegate is an interesting street. Perhaps now a place where different ‘cultures’ are clashing. There’s clearly a movement to change the feel of the street, to promote it as a shopping street and community of businesses, like Fossgate perhaps. To me, and other people of my age and older, it has always had the word ‘run’ attached to it – as in ‘Micklegate run’, meaning it was a magnet for people out on a pub crawl who went down the street from one pub to another. Not something I’ve ever done myself. I remember tending to avoid it at ‘chucking out time’ (often accompanied by chucking-up time) on weekend evenings.

Back then, of course, we tended to be chucked out of the pubs not long after eleven. Drinking up time was announced with a shout from behind the bar and, as I recall, a bell ringing (or was that just some pubs). As I’m writing I’m suddenly recalling, almost hearing it again, the preceding ‘Last orders at the bar, ladies and gentlemen, please’.

But it’s different now, isn’t it. That 2003 Licensing Act referred to in the official notice on the window changed the rules on opening hours and made them more flexible. Apparently it came into effect in November 2005. So we’ve had just over a decade of this new relaxed ‘open all hours’ approach in our licensed premises.

So many things could be said. Perhaps this isn’t the place to attempt a lengthy discussion of what tends to be called ‘the drinking culture’. But I have to mention that I keep thinking of the Esher report, and its promotion of the idea that more people should be living in the city centre, within the walls, and how this has been encouraged, with many new apartment blocks and more people living in flats above shops. But we only need to read the observations of Pamela Ward in that report, where she describes the cultural life of the city, to realise that city centre living in the age of the 11pm ‘last orders’ would be a very different thing to city centre living now.

And in the Micklegate area … it’s hard to see that it will ever be a quiet kind of street, though there are obvious moves towards trying to make it more ‘gentrified’, like the rest of the city centre. But it’s still the main gateway in from the racecourse, the first street of pubs within the walls that the racegoers arrive in, coming up that ancient straightish road from the Knavesmire. And it’s near the station, and it has its reputation, and it has always had a lot of pubs, and that’s part of its identity.

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Railway Street is now known as George Hudson Street.

See also …

Audrey’s memories of Blossom Street, the Forsselius garages on Blossom Street and Kitch’s garage at Clifton, and her memories of York during the Second World War.

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2011

Micklegate is a street of contrasts. It has, for example, handsome 18th century townhouses, and just across the way, these medieval buildings. It’s also an interesting mix of genteel and rowdy. In the daytime, it’s quite genteel.

With Micklegate Bar at the top, it’s a main entrance to the city – some say the main entrance – certainly visiting royalty always seem to come this way and enter through Micklegate Bar.

I know that this street – like many streets a little further out from the main tourist shopping centre – is struggling a bit. This is the Blake Head Bookshop, which closed earlier this year.

It’s never a good thing when a bookshop closes, and I know that many people were sad to see the end of the Blake Head.

On a more positive note, Micklegate still has a post office. You don’t see many around these days.

At the top of the road, Bar Lane Studios brings a bit of artistic flair. And down the road, there’s dancing, at the brilliantly named ‘Fancy Dance Shop’, all pink and cheery, with everything you need for ‘Tapping out from ballet to Ballroom’, as it says on the sign.

Fancy Dance is on my favourite stretch of this handsome street, where there’s a slight bend, and the incline of the hill, and the light falls beautifully late in the day. The man in the photo looks like he might be about to break into a dance routine, inspired by the sunlit beauties of Micklegate, but I think it was just a jaunty kind of walk.

Opposite ‘Fancy Dance’ is a handsome Victorian building, now a pub called the Artful Dodger, though I remember it as a pub called Walker’s Bar, which I frequented often in the late 1980s.

It’s a strange street, which should be grand, is grand in some ways, but then at night it has a different face entirely. The ‘Micklegate run’ was notorious years ago, the idea apparently being to go out on a weekend evening and visit all the pubs all down Micklegate before vomiting on the pavement at the bottom of the hill.

This York tradition seems to have continued, and the venues for revelry have spread to neighbouring streets, with clubs and restaurants which seem louder and bigger and brasher than they used to be on nearby Rougier Street and Toft Green.

As a York resident, I have to say that the main association with the street name ‘Micklegate’ was always pubs, clubs, and wild weekend evenings.

Bohemia is one of many frontages around here that are painted black. Rather more traditionally ‘historic’ is the street frontage of The Priory, though the frontage is I think not a reliable indicator of the interior, in this case. The arched logo over its name is I guess supposed to suggest the religious establishment – a Priory for Benedictine monks – which was once on this street, and which Priory Street is named after, but it just makes me think of the famous drug rehabilitation clinic. It does seem a little odd naming a pub after an institution presumably big on the traditional monastic ideas of celibacy and being sober and devout. Actually, I’ve not been in it for years. Maybe it is full of men in robes praying.

I haven’t really done Micklegate justice. I don’t come this way into town, and when I go into town I go straight through a different bar in the city walls, and head for the centre. If Micklegate Bar is your gateway into town you’ll know this street better than I do. If you don’t know it, and haven’t been for a while, it sounds like the local traders need your support. Along here you can get fish and chips, browse second-hand books (though perhaps not in that order, unless you’ve washed your hands), have a choice of hairdressers, get a tattoo or a body piercing, look at art, visit a historic church, and of course there’s also the Fancy Dance shop. And lots more. At night, well, it’s perhaps not the kind of ‘evening economy’ the tourism folks like to promote – but I kind of like it for that.

Certainly worth a wander up here in the late afternoon, to admire its many and varied handsome street frontages lit by late sun.

. . . . .

Page compiled 2 September 2011. Photos taken in March, July and August 2011.

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