2 Rougier Street, from just outside the city walls, 7 May 2021

Previously we were peering into a pond just outside the city walls. Now it’s time to look upwards, to a clock, and the building it’s on, just inside the city walls. Yes, it’s time to admire the majestic skyline of Rougier Street …

This ‘landmark’ building, 2 Rougier Street, was previously insurance company offices. It has been included on these pages before. Adverts in decades past featured rather stylish hand-drawn illustrations of the building.

2 Rougier Street, 1970s advert

I’ve also previously mentioned its clock, when compiling pages about the various clocks to be seen on the city streets. The one on this building was for a while one of the city’s many stopped clocks, but is now showing the right time. I guess it would have to, or would have to be removed, as an old stopped clock doesn’t give the right impression on a new hotel. Which is what this building is now.

Malmaison hotel, 2 Rougier Street, 7 May 2021

In recent years there was a planning application to convert the office block to residential accommodation, but that didn’t happen. It’s now a hotel under the ‘Malmaison’ brand. It was due to open this month, but apparently its opening has been delayed.

This previously very tall building is now a bit taller, with one of those weird additions that seem to be the thing in recent years, of adding height to a building but setting the extra storey back a bit, presumably to make it less visible/intrusive. But part of it is visible from the city walls, and it’s very visible from the Leeman Road area near the railway museum, as pictured on an earlier page.

It’s also quite visible if you’re down the other end of Rougier Street looking back up at it.

Let’s go through the archway and enter the gloomy canyon …

Rougier Street view, 10 May 2021

In the distance there, the archway we’ve just come through, and the Memorial Gardens and triangular park beyond it. They’re all bathed in evening sunlight, but none of it reaches down here, because of the height of the light-blocking buildings, 2 Rougier Street and its more recent neighbour.

I really don’t like the look of the extra storey, but get the impression that many people are looking forward to visiting the ‘sky bar’ up there, when it opens.

Back down at street level, I recently I found an interesting image in an article in the Press, showing a view of Rougier Street from a similar place to the one above, but before the office block in the foreground was built.

Rougier Street, 1982 (from York Press)

I’m used to the way Rougier Street looks, and the scale of that office building, but looking at it afresh, in this photo, I wonder how a building of that scale was permitted in such a sensitive location. It just looks wrong, plonked there, out of keeping with everything around it.

Perhaps it was thought that the railway offices to the left of it had set a precedent for tall buildings in this part of the city. But the contrast between the two and the impact of the large office block is clear.

Since then of course the foreground area, where the low building was, has been filled with another large building, as pictured above.

On the subject of tall buildings, and as we are on Rougier Street, looking at one side of it, maybe it’s time to turn to the other side of it to confront ‘the most shameful and absurd decision any committee has ever made‘ … ?

… or maybe it needs some more thought.

Let’s briefly escape 2021 and run off into 1971. More on that story later.

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Aviva building, 2 Rougier St, reminders of old signage, April 2016

While on my way to look at Hudson House earlier this week I noticed this, the subject of today’s ‘April daily photo‘, from the vantage point of the city walls.

It’s a building I’ve written about before, a rather dominant presence at the end of Rougier Street. I took a few quick snapshots of it, noticing what we might call a ‘ghost sign’, revealed by the removal of its most recent signage for Aviva.

When I wrote about it before — inspired by a splendid hand-drawn illustration of it in a 1970s advertisement — I wasn’t sure what to call it. Because it seemed to have changed its name quite often, as the insurance company whose office it was changed its name, following various acquisitions and mergers. So I just called it ‘2 Rougier Street’.

But here, under its most recent plastic signage, it held ghostly reminders of a couple of those changes of name. Zooming in and doing a bit of digital enhancement reveals them:

2 Rougier St, detail: reminders of old signage, April 2016

‘Norwich Union’ is obvious. I thought I could also see a large ‘C’ to the right, and then remembered — wasn’t it CGU? — and some Googling revealed that it was (formed in 1998 from the merger of Commercial Union and General Accident).

When I’ve written about ‘ghost signs’ before it’s been in the sense of old adverts painted on brick walls, the fading kind, often hidden away behind newer advertising billboards, or still faintly visible. This is even more ‘ghostly’, though no paint has been involved here.

The signs, as I recall and as these reminders of them suggest, were plastic lettering. So what we’re seeing now must be the shadow left around them from the dirt accumulated back then.

This is a very congested, traffic-filled corner, with high levels of air pollution, something noted in the planning application documents for its conversion to residential.

These subtle sooty reminders of decades past made me think about how this office too was a major employer in the city, and when I think about the place now, having focused my attention, the name that comes to mind is ‘General Accident’, which must have been the name it had around the time I left school, when many people seemed to get jobs at General Accident.

No sign of that in the sooty shadows, but important to remember these things.

I guess they’ll clean up this important bar-walls-facing frontage, so I’m glad I captured this, if only on my compact camera in a quick passing snapshot.

Further information

‘Aviva’s history in York is really the history of Yorkshire Insurance’ says this fascinating article including many old photographs of York and advertisements from decades past.

There’s more information on heritage.aviva.com, on the Yorkshire Insurance Company Ltd (includes General Accident), and see also CGNU and Norwich Union.

A photo of the building in 2008 with the Norwich Union name

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1970s ad for Yorkshire General, with 2 Rougier St in background

Time to catch up on planning applications. Well, some of the more interesting ones. This particular one gives me a chance to include the groovy late 1970s advert above, from one of the old guides to York I picked up a few years back in the closing-down sale at the Barbican Bookshop. The happy-looking couple are in front of the Rougier Street office of Yorkshire General, as it was then. Now Aviva. Let’s just call it 2 Rougier Street.

It’s interesting that this is another of those ‘office to residential’ conversions. Perhaps all the city’s large office blocks dating from the later 20th century will end up being converted to residential use. It’s happened already with Hilary House (now Biba House) and the office block on Holgate Road, and may happen at Hudson House and Ryedale House, and others.

This is the link to the planning application documents, if you’d like to read more or make a comment.

The building in question looms large over Rougier Street, adding to the ‘gloomy canyon‘ effect of that street. But retaining the buildings we’ve already got is usually preferable to knocking them down.

Observers of changes in the city will have noticed that everything built on the Hungate redevelopment site and in the nearby Walmgate area is similarly lofty and light-blocking. It’s unlikely that knocking this building down would bring us anything better.

It looks okay, fifty years or so after it was built. At least where it faces the junction and the city walls. It has a nice clock on the corner. Would that be kept? Would it be kept and keep time, even? I don’t know as I haven’t had time to look at the planning application documents.

Some photos follow of the building from various angles taken at various times in the past ten years. And further information follows, in the links below.

View from the walls towards the Minster, 2005, including 2 Rougier St, next to the railway offices (now Cedar Court Grand)

View from the city walls near Lendal Bridge, looking towards the entrance to Rougier Street (2011)

Golden loveliness on the horizon, framed by the gloomy canyon of Rougier St. 2 Rougier St on the right (2012)

Further information

In 2009, the Press reported on York Civic Trust’s verdict on City of York Council HQ options, one of which, at the time (2009) was the building above. (As we now know, West Offices was chosen.)

June 2015: Aviva looks to sell York office as part of £225 million savings bid

History of the Yorkshire Insurance Company (heritage.aviva.com)

The advertisement at the top of the page is from a late 1970s guide to York. It was printed — as so many local publications were — by a York firm whose name will be familiar to many.

Ben Johnson’s, later Donnelleys, and now no more. The old Ben Johnson’s, in York, is remembered in this rather nice letter in yesterday’s Press: ‘York was very fortunate indeed to have Ben Johnson’s, the home of Europe’s finest printer, in its city’.

Update, 2021

The conversion to residential didn’t happen. The building is now a hotel, due to open in 2021. More on that on this page.

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September 2011

After admiring positive and inspiring changes to buildings on Wellington Row and Tanners Moat, I’ve continued my wanders. Around the corner we enter the gloomy canyon known as Rougier Street.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

But please don’t leave yet – we end up in a charming old alleyway.

I was rather struck by the image of this office building through the glass roof of the bus shelter … but otherwise it’s a bit grim down here. The light is all swallowed up on this street.

There are many reasons York is special and provokes the emotions it does, but one of them is that most of it feels like it’s on a human scale. In the medieval/historic centre the only building that makes you feel really overshadowed by its massive bulk is the Minster, and you don’t mind being towered over by that, as it’s all pale and beautiful and intricate.

Here on Rougier Street you’re overshadowed by gloom and concrete. And possibly brick – I don’t know, I always rush down it as quickly as possible to escape its hideous soulless gloom.

But at its bottom end, where it meets George Hudson Street, there’s hope of salvation.

There’s Club Salvation, painted black, and in case that doesn’t save you, Bar Salvation.

They’re both ugly too, sadly.

Bar Salvation used to be the Grob and Ducat (aka The Grobs), and I remember watching Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark’ on its then new and exciting video jukebox, and Madonna cavorting around in a gondola doing ‘Like a Virgin’, on the same. Perhaps other things were on it – I guess so – though it was the mid-80s and we had lower expectations then, so perhaps it was just Brucie and Madonna on endless repeat.

The other notable aspect of this depressing street is that it is full of buses. Elsewhere on this site, in one of its less-visited corners, I can offer you a historical view (1980s) of the wall of the Grobs, with 80s graffiti, and many more photos of buses in Rougier Street.

Back in the present, on the 21st century evening I visited, the club and bar were closed, so I didn’t find out if they really did offer salvation.

Nipping down the side of ‘Bar Salvation’ and taking a quick right turn down a narrow opening between buildings takes you to All Saints Church. And to one of my favourite corners, a narrow lane leading to it. Churches have been, of course, more traditionally associated with salvation. When I came out for a walk I wasn’t looking for salvation, I was just looking for some photos, but having experienced the peculiarly depressing effect of all that gloom and black paint on Rougier Street, I could almost have converted from my agnosticism, had the church been open.

This alleyway is alongside All Saints, a church with a spire that glows in midsummer evening sunlight like it’s pointing the way to heaven. But for now I’m checking on the alleyway down here, and whether anything has been done yet with this rather charming building, once a boxing club. All alleyways should look like this one does. There’s a fabulous specimen of a yellow corydalis – one of York’s most successful weeds – growing out of its old brickwork. On the other side is the church, and just along from it, proper historic medieval buildings, now rather stranded, with the medieval neighbours long gone, and instead another huge out-of-scale thing plonked on the riverside across the road (was the Viking Hotel, now has some other name, still charmless).

Still, down this alleyway it’s proper York. A mix of deeply historic and significant buildings, listed and admired, and a place made of brick, with bits of utilitarian pipe sticking out of one end at a jaunty angle.

Though nothing’s changed much down this alleyway, there have been changes nearby in Tanners Moat and Wellington Row.

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