A stone’s throw from the Moss Street depot featured on a recent page, here’s St Clement’s church hall, as it was in late July 2004. A charming building, even with its boarded-up windows.

Now fully restored and with its windows letting in light again:

Now known as Clements Hall, it has all kinds of things going on. The Clements Hall website has more information on the building and its history.

When I walked this way in 2004, randomly wandering wherever the fancy took me, I took a couple of left turns a little further on and discovered this equally charming ‘church house’ on Cygnet Street, behind the church hall.

In the intervening years, like the former church hall above, the church house has been restored. Here it is in August 2014.

It was the old hand-painted sign, back in 2004, which made this house stand out, gave it a story. This was the ST CLEMENT’S CHURCH HOUSE as its elegant sign informed me, in faded and peeling paint.

Restored since, and handsome it is.

Though perhaps this building isn’t actually a ‘church house’ anymore. What was a ‘church house’ anyway? What happened in it? So many questions, so little time to research them these days. Perhaps someone else knows. Please leave a comment if you do.

The above is a reminder that the city’s visible changes aren’t always about buildings being demolished with new ones put in their place. ‘Past and present’ comparisons often focus on that, but what we perhaps don’t appreciate enough is how much work goes into keeping all these historic buildings in our care, and how much time and effort it takes to find suitable reuses for empty buildings, and the funding to support their renovation.

I’ve been wanting to feature this building for some time, and it’s nice to be able to do so. Made possible by a kind sponsor, a reader and supporter of this site. Thank you.

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The other side of the engine house, six years on, in August 2013.

Everything looks better under a blue sky, but then this building has always looked good, even when dilapidated and empty. And the area behind it was always photogenic. Which is why I find I’ve many photos of it, too many to fit on a page. (An album to follow.)

(Here it is: Engine house and nearby, photos 2004-13)

In case you’re wondering where it is, here it is in its context, pictured in January 2011, from inside the Museum Gardens, from the bank of the city wall. That short stretch we tend to forget is a section of city wall, heading towards Lendal Tower. In the distance, on the left, the former railway offices across the river. To the right, the Museum Gardens. Near the engine house, to the left, is the toilet block, demolished as part of the work taking place here.

I’m not in the mood for a history lesson, though the history of the engine house is interesting, instead I’d like to mention that this was one of my favourite forgotten corners, behind the engine house, all peeling paint and piles of old fencing and ivy and weeds.

In the summer of 2007 the land behind the engine house seemed to be a bin graveyard, with disheveled ranks of 1970s style bins.

Cut into the bank of the city wall, a short tunnel, an archway, here stuffed full of more junk, in the summer of 2007.

Lendal Tower itself and the houses in its shadow were refurbished, but the engine house remained empty for many years, with the proposed redevelopment as a restaurant apparently stalled. But this year it’s all started, the transformation of this place. It’s not a quiet corner now, but full of activity and cement and steel and men in hard hats.

The door in the archway is open, and passers-by on the slope down to the river next to Lendal Bridge can see the work taking place around the engine house.

And here’s what they’ve been making. Photo taken a couple of days ago from the riverside walkway near Lendal Bridge. The old engine house in the background, with a new extension to one side (where the toilet block used to be). All part of The Star Inn the City, opening this autumn.

So much more could be said, but perhaps readers can share their thoughts. I know many people who read these pages are now many miles away, but like to keep up with changes and developments. This, so close to Lendal Bridge, is I think an important one, after the engine house was empty for so long.

Many readers will know the building as the offices of York Waterworks. I’m interested, as always, in our more recent history, the meanings buildings have to residents, and the stories connected to those buildings we perhaps take for granted, like this one. So please add a comment if you have information to share.

More

Information from Heritage Explorer

The engine house was mentioned on an earlier (pre-blog, 2009) page on this site, which includes historical information

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A planning application has been submitted for the conversion of the upper floors to residential accommodation, with retail space below. If you’re thinking this sounds familiar, it is. There was a planning application in autumn last year, which was approved. This one doesn’t seem much different, though the number of apartments has increased slightly and includes some affordable housing provision.

I know some people aren’t welcoming the idea of another Sainsbury’s Local. Just down the road one way is a Tesco Express, down the road and round a corner or two is another Tesco Express, and a Morrison’s is going to open on Spurriergate, near that Tesco Express. There is I believe another Sainsbury’s Local due to open at the bottom of Micklegate. I won’t go on as it would take forever …

But let’s look on the positive side. I feel the need to, after the recent news on the Burnholme club building.

A quick recap:

— The White Swan hotel, with its many rooms, has been unused since 1982. Yes, since 1982.

— For years and years people moaned about it being ‘an eyesore’ (covered at length a couple of years ago on this page).

— When the owners first suggested redevelopment of the site, with a complete rebuild, people complained about the loss of this handsome building.

— So they then drew up plans which retained the exterior we’re so fond of, and put them on show to the public, with what looked to me like genuine concern for the views of local residents.

— As part of the planning application the owners commissioned a detailed historic building report (PDF). If only all documents produced to support planning applications were so carefully and thoughtfully produced.

— They’ve now had to make a few minor changes to the plans, and it looks like an occupant has been found for the ground floor. A successful and well-known name, unlikely to go out of business.

So, people will be living here, in the centre of York, in a handsome building we can all continue to admire, and the shop underneath will sell things we actually need, like food.

Great. Please can we all be happy. A reminder again, it’s 30 years since the top floors of this building were in use. Back then, in 1982, the guests in the hotel might have been listening to The Goombay Dance Band or Dexys.
So come on, be happy. Get your dungarees on and let’s have a dance (1982 style):

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There’s a ‘ghost’ of the former shopfront in the visible difference in the brick.

I’m no expert, but this looks like a sensitive restoration, with a bow window like those on either side, presumably specially made to match as this isn’t your standard window these days.

How it did look:

What I hadn’t noticed or thought about until I looked at this photo is that number 67 also shows the ghost of a shopfront in its brickwork. The city archives have a photo dating from around 1940. Number 67 is the last building visible before the front gardens of what is now the Churchill Hotel. According to the description, which I’m having some difficulty linking to at present, “Tyerman Sturdy’s chemist shop, Hannon’s fruiterers, Edmund Moat’s grocers and Coastal Fisheries” all feature on this photo.

Now that stretch from the corner of Bootham Crescent to the Churchill Hotel houses a Londis, a sandwich shop, and also a dry cleaners, in a shop inserted in number 75 at some point after the early 1940s, while 67 and 69 have lost theirs.

These buildings weren’t built as shops, but as houses. So Whiting’s is just returning to its original use. A reflection of changing needs and changing trends in shopping.

Perhaps we’ll see more and more examples of this, on the streets leading out of town, as more people shop in the out of town centres, or online, and we find we have more retail premises than we need.

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The transformation of the ‘Harvey-Scruton’ buildings is complete. These buildings were not listed, but they’ve been preserved anyway, which is very pleasing. That handsome doorway is still there, with better paintwork.

This lane and these buildings were included on an early page, back in 2004, and looked the same for many years, until recently.

I hope it doesn’t sound daft to say that I had a strong feeling of ‘connection’ to this place. Yes, it does look daft. But, anyway.

I’ve no idea why. Maybe one of my York ancestors lived along here at one time. Who knows.

Maybe it ’speaks’ to a lot of people, not just me. It’s special, is Barker Lane. That, of course, is because it’s an ancient lane. And all our ancient lanes have special qualities a thoroughfare like Parliament Street doesn’t have. More on that another time perhaps.

The Micklegate end of it looks much the same, and the Harvey Scruton buildings are preserved, but this narrow ancient lane has been changed at its Tanner Row/Toft Green end by the enormous grey bulk of a new hotel built next to the transformed West Offices. It seems to loom over Barker Lane, light-blocking.

These photos were taken in the evening, when the light was low anyway. I’ll try to revisit and get photos when the sun is higher in the sky, but for now these will have to do, as this page is long overdue.

The changes here seem to encapsulate the wider changes in this city, the cultural shifts, changes of emphasis. At the junction where Barker Lane meets Tanner Row and Toft Green, the old red brick walls overshadowed by the large hotel with its brand displayed in red plastic lettering, the new kid on the block. In the background, the 19th century railway station/railway offices (West Offices) sensitively restored as the council headquarters for the 21st century. Behind me, where a small local business once manufactured pharmaceutical products, a change of use. To ‘residential’, kind of, in a short-term way.

It’s very classy. I’m no expert, but now I’ve read many of the planning application documents and admired the handsome Barker Lane frontage it looks like this was an imaginative and thoughtful redevelopment, respecting that ‘sense of place’ I keep trying to record on these pages.

And no, of course I haven’t forgotten the most remembered/important part of this lane. That too has changed:

… and deserves a page of its own.

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As part of the Residents Festival we were invited to have a nosy around West Offices, our new council HQ, before its official opening later this year. This seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. It may be more difficult to properly gawp at the architecture when the building is in use, full of busy staff and people coming in to complain about their bin collections.

Here’s the front of the building, on the Tanner Row side. In the old days, when this was the station, I guess the Victorian traveller would have entered the building by the same entrance we used today.

The older part of the building is a U shape, with two ‘arms’ off the back of the Station Rise frontage. The railway lines and platforms had once been in the gap between. Now in that space is a massive atrium, which I’ve viewed many times from the city wall nearby, as it took shape. So now we’re inside that modern central part. It’s very nice. We were genuinely impressed.

Here’s that central part, looking upwards to the massive metal and glass roof.

On the parts of the floors visible above was a lot of furniture, still wrapped, clearly being put into place ready for the staff who are relocating here in a couple of months time.

The particularly groovy bit is seeing exterior walls inside this building, walls from the original station. These photos were taken inside the atrium. The black drainpipes are rather dominant, and are presumably bringing water from the roof, as I deduced from hearing melted snow trickling down them. This was strangely disconcerting, but in a good way. Probably a good thing to be reminded of the weather and the world outside while stuck inside in the office.

Though according to my dad’s stories of this building they also got reminded of the weather outside quite frequently, as in the BR days it wasn’t quite so smart, and a bit leaky in places, with rain coming in and running down walls, rather than being encased in pipe.

On the ground floor, surrounding a central space at present filled with display boards, are many small glass-walled rooms. All very transparent, and presumably designed to be reassuring. Around the outside, in the older bit, I assume the offices have kept the more traditional non see-through wall, so staff have somewhere to go when they feel like banging their heads against one, or crying. It must be difficult working for the council, and getting moaned at and complained about all the time.

Beyond the atrium, at the open end of the older buildings, the part most people seem most pleased about. The reconstructed canopy from the old station, carefully dismantled and rebuilt, now a very posh bikeshed. I like the way so many railway lines have been turned into cycle tracks, and this is another interesting example of a railway-related structure turning into a bike-related structure.

Beyond it, to one side the also recently-built hotel, and across car park the old (mid-20th century) Hudson House, looking even grubbier than usual next to this elegant pale ironwork.

As we left, I stopped by the back of the building for a moment, near the elegant canopy, looking back in through the windows into the main building, and suddenly felt quite moved and a bit tearful. And quite surprised at this emotional moment. It’s probably quite normal to feel emotional if you walk into a sunlit chapel and the organist is playing beautiful music and it makes you think of someone you’ve lost. But feeling emotional about the new council headquarters?

Partly because I’ve always felt a connection to this place, though I’d never been inside it. But thirty years ago, during a particularly difficult part of my troubled adolescence, I was living with my father, rather than with my mother, and many days, after school, used to stand on the pavement outside West Offices, waiting for him as he left work, then we’d walk to get the car from the car park on Leeman Road.

There’s a lot of talk about the building’s history as a station, long ago before any of us were born, but for many of us it’s the recent history here that’s more important, ours, our parents and grandparents.

It could I guess have been sold off as another hotel, or to some other wealthy commercial concern. And thereby taken away from us, as the railway HQ opposite has been, somehow removed from my fondly-remembered ‘railway city’ landscape.

Whereas this way it’s still ‘ours’, isn’t it.

There’s been a lot of moaning about this new HQ. But it now seems so completely right that it’s here in this building. So much so that it seems odd that any other place (eg the Hungate new build) was ever considered.

Clever people working together have remodelled the place, adding modern parts to its old brick walls and curved-top timber-framed windows, reinstating its iron columns, and, most importantly, putting it back into use as a proper working building again. I really appreciate that.

Though I’ve lived here in York all my life I sometimes feel I don’t belong anymore, and I know I’m not alone in that. It has changed almost beyond recognition in so many ways in the last 40 years, with the increasing reliance on the ‘cultural offer’ and the ‘visitor offer’. We don’t want to keep endlessly offering. We want some things for ourselves, keeping, safeguarding, for people who live here.

Daft as it sounds, in this case I feel like the local authority took something really important to me and gave it a big hug. Them and everyone else involved in the project. A big group hug even.

Hence my brief emotional moment at the back of West Offices. Civic pride, almost, you might call it. Crikey.

See also

I hope everyone’s seen the photo of Station Rise (gated private road part), taken from West Offices, when it was briefly opened to through traffic in January 1982, during the floods.

Following the West Offices development:
West Offices work completed (Dec 2012) and wandering about around the West Offices building site (Aug 2011)

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