The way we were: York Walks, summer 2004, at www.yorkstories.co.uk

Back in 2004, in the ‘York Walks’ which formed the original version of this website, I put together a page with the title ‘Watch this space‘. It included several buildings widely condemned as ‘eyesores’ in the intervening years.

If you were indeed watching those places and spaces you’ll be aware that it took a long time, but that four of the six buildings featured are either back in use or on their way to being occupied.

Firstly, Shipton Street School, its main frontage on Shipton Street. Many years ago I also took a lot of photos of the other side of it, from the playground area. I have an update on those too, but for now, this was the face it presented to the street for a decade or so.

And now, in 2014:

Another wider view, also from Shipton Street, in 2004:

And in 2014:

The most obvious difference between the 2004 and 2014 views is the number of parked cars. There are several possible reasons for this, not necessarily to do with the Shipton St School development, though it may be. Perhaps someone who lives on or near Shipton St can add a resident’s perspective in the comments.

Less obvious, not obvious at all unless you happened to walk by when the windows weren’t boarded up, but the conversion to residential did change and perhaps spoil the windows. Inevitable. I might have some photos somewhere but they were that lovely old wobbly glass with interesting reflections, and no doubt on the inside the teacher had to use some kind of long pole with a hook on the end to open and close them. Or perhaps I’m having a memory resurface there from Mill Mount School. Anyway, the old school windows are gone, which is a shame. On the other hand, these windows are letting in light for the first time for a decade or more and the building is back in use.

Shipton St School is out in the suburbs so didn’t get that much attention. The Bonding Warehouse, on the other hand, is well-known. I’ve covered it in depth already on many pages over the last ten years, but I haven’t yet featured its completed bridge on the street side. Thanks to Gwen Swinburn for alerting me to this change.

Bonding Warehouse, Skeldergate side, in August 2004:

And from more or less the same vantage point now, 2014:

With very prominent and very ugly signs. The signs are apparently necessary to indicate the height of the bridge. The bridge was constructed to allow the residents of the upper floors to access their accommodation. I’d got the impression that they were to have some kind of temporary emergency bridge in case of floods, like the other residents of Skeldergate do, but clearly not.

The bridge itself is okay, its associated signs are … well, an eyesore. A word I avoid using as it tends to be indiscriminately and thoughtlessly applied to any empty boarded-up building. But here it seems appropriate.

Not that it really matters. They’re just really intrusive signs, and the city is full of them. At least those ridiculous Lendal Bridge ones have been removed.

Moving on to the city’s most famous eyesore … in 2004:

Like the Bonding Warehouse, this building has been the subject of several pages. Like the Bonding it was reoccupied eventually, or is in the process of being. Work continues on its conversion to residential and retail. The scaffolding was removed recently and here’s how it looked:

… not much different from before. Which was exactly what we the public wanted, when consulted. So that’s good, isn’t it.

. . . . . .

So, three substantial buildings sitting there boarded-up 10 years ago are now back in use or on their way to being so. Two are listed buildings so we had to keep them. The White Swan isn’t but it’s a pretty mock Tudor thing where it meets the street, and we wouldn’t make anything better than that now probably, so it’s sensible choosing to keep it.

There are still boarded-up buildings surviving, but only a couple of substantial ones I can think of. More on them and other things later, if someone wants to sponsor more hours of writing and compiling.

The other buildings featured on ‘Watch this space’ ten years ago were 1) Burton Croft, included on a recent page; 2) the Clifton hospital laundry (demolished) and 3) the St Clement’s church hall and associated house. They’re the subject of the next page.

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Time to catch up on some changes to places previously featured on these pages. Firstly, Shipton St School.

These photos can be enlarged.

Work moves on apace, with the new homes in the former playground area now at the stage where their roof timbers are ready to be put into position.

The older buildings are covered in scaffolding, being stripped back, though with important architectural features retained.

These photos were taken from the short stretch of street off Newborough St, where large double gates led into the playground. This was, at one time, Pickering Terrace, a street of eight terraced houses, bombed during the war. Now, seventy years on, new houses are being built where the old ones once were.

The floodlight visible in the background indicates the closeness of these new homes to Bootham Crescent football ground, home of the Minstermen — aka the cathedral boys.

The main school building fronting onto Shipton Street. It’s a dominant presence in this street of small terraced houses, and the people who live here were no doubt beginning to find its boarded-up windows depressing. Will be good to see them opened up again and letting the light in.

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… well, a couple of them

So there’s movement at last on two long-empty “eyesores”, the White Swan Hotel and Shipton Street School site. Both were included on a page on this site back in 2004 which attempted a round-up of some of York’s empty buildings. The school is a listed building, the hotel isn’t, but both are to be remodelled rather than demolished. Gutted inside, presumably, but looking similar from the outside. Well, smarter, without boarded-up windows.

… but not others

Also included on the 2004 list was the Bonding Warehouse. Still no sign of a solution for this one, though there were glimmers of hope when I started drafting this page. Council leader James Alexander said recently that the council is “committed to the creation of a digital media and cultural centre” and that this was the preferred site. Councillor Anna Semlyen, on Twitter, questioned the wisdom of putting “High tech kit in [a] flood zone”. Reasonable question, which was later discussed by councillors. The Press later suggested the Bonding Warehouse idea may have been dropped.

Another large empty building, another “eyesore” mentioned before. Not as pretty as the old warehouse or the disused hotel, but better looking than the looming dullness of the buildings further down the street. A place once home to forward-thinking endeavours. The dreams of flight flew off elsewhere when the local authority of the time weren’t supportive.

Apparently today’s innovators are also leaving the city, not because of a lack of support, but because of a shortage of suitable premises. How about reclaiming this place? Maybe the memories of Airspeed and the playfulness of more recent occupier Megazone could help inspire flights of creative fancy in the digital/cultural realm. But as to most people it’s just “that old bus garage” it’s more likely to be bulldozed and replaced with a 21st century version of the horrible Ryedale House.

Then there’s this old place, unoccupied and looking more decrepit with each year that passes. It isn’t an obvious landmark building like the Bonding Warehouse, but it does have historical and cultural significance, as the Tukes lived here, according to the photos and associated records on www.imagineyork.co.uk. I heard that York Quakers were concerned about the building, and Jonathan Calder’s blog mentioned it recently, but other than that it appears there’s not much interest.

It would be nice to hear from anyone who has further information on this building – its history or plans for it in the future.

It’s a difficult thing of course to rescue neglected buildings, and perhaps we can’t save them all. So many have been saved from dereliction, and one or two come to mind which I’ve neglected to mention. Will save those for another time.

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Another building awaiting redevelopment is Shipton Street School, alongside the football ground, in the Bootham/Clifton area. It has been empty for years. It appears that the proposed development was given planning permission with an expiry date of 21 Oct 2012 for work to begin. Which perhaps explains the recent appearance of machinery on the site.

The Press headline this week said ‘Bulldozers move in’. You could be forgiven for getting the impression from that headline that the school was about to be ‘torn down’ (to use another favourite phrase of headline writers). At present they’re just digging up the playground area, as shown on the photos below. I didn’t see any bulldozers bashing into the Victorian brick walls, and they won’t be, not intentionally anyway, as the redevelopment plans have been designed around retaining the original buildings. Their exterior, at least. The school buildings will be converted for residential use, with more houses built in what was the playground. (The Press article itself makes this clear, the headline though appears to have caused alarm.)

The school is surrounded now by housing, nestled in the middle of these terraced streets, with the stands of the football ground tight up to its other boundary at the back. When Shipton St School was first built, in 1890, it had a rather more open aspect. The maps show it with nothing immediately alongside it, and no buildings to the front for some distance, the open space of the cricket ground behind.

Back then it looked out onto what was still an open field. Development had taken place between the school and the railway line, with Scarborough Terrace, Filey Terrace and Grosvenor Terrace to the east and south. Most of Newborough Street had been built, with Pickering Terrace leading off from it towards the school playground.

Within the next ten or twenty years the terraced streets opposite the school had covered the open field, beyond them stood the new streets of terraced housing off Burton Stone Lane. Much of this was presumably housing workers at the Rowntree’s factory between Haxby Road and Wigginton Road, just over the other side of the railway line. Their children would have attended this school at the heart of the newly built-up area.

We call it Shipton Street School, but it used to be referred to as Shipton Street Schools, plural. It catered for ‘Boys, Girls, and Infants’. The infants used the small school building in the playground area, on the left of the photo. The 1891 plan has a clear dividing line down the middle of the main school building and its playground, one side for girls, the other for boys.

There were still children playing out there – no longer segregated by gender, I assume – more than a century later when we moved into the area. I could hear them shouting and laughing in the playground sometimes, voices carried on the breeze across Clifton rooftops. The school closed in 2002 and has been empty since.

When I had the opportunity to trespass briefly through a broken gate, five years ago, the playground concrete was still decorated with painted numbers and squares, and compass points. Today it was all mud and rubble. In the corner closest to the stands of the football ground were signs of a slightly deeper digging, with trenches in rectangular patterns. These must be I think the foundations of one side of Pickering Terrace, where bombs fell and a woman died, on the night of the Baedeker raid 70 years ago. No sign of that short street now, just these muddy foundations, soon to be covered with the foundations of another generation’s building.

Already gone is the playground painting of snakes and ladders.

If all goes according to plan there’ll be houses here, and parking spaces, neat white lines on tarmac where there used to be a pink snake on concrete. Let’s hope the young people who might want to buy a house here can get a foothold on the increasingly slippery ‘housing ladder’, and don’t meet too many snakes.

Also on this site – from here and nearby

Earlier visit, summer 2007
The lost street of Pickering Terrace

Asylum Lane and the ‘Cathedral Boys’ (football ground)

Elsewhere on the web

Details of the planning application and later minor amendments, from the City of York Council website

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The Bonding Warehouse, being on the riverside and within the walls, gets a lot of attention. A surprising amount of attention, considering it’s been empty for so long. Every now and then there are plans to bring it back into use, and work on one of these started, before the difficult economic climate ended it.

Passing by yesterday I noticed that it’s becoming a graffiti wall. Again. Then this morning The Press carried a story about the most recent plans to bring it back into use.

Its location will probably mean it is saved from complete dereliction. Because of concerns about what visitors think.

We have many historic buildings to maintain. Particularly in the city centre – the important income-generating part of this place we call York. All that historic fabric is quite a responsibility. Which is perhaps why redundant Victorian buildings in suburban areas beyond the walls don’t have much of a chance.

School buildings were important to the communities around them when the city’s built-up areas expanded so far beyond the walls in the late 19th century. St Barnabas School, in the Leeman Road area, was surrounded by small terraced houses. Buildings like this give a necessary focus and form a recognisable landmark in streets of converging terraces. But in the 21st century being a landmark isn’t enough. York needs more housing. A few more new houses fitted onto this area of land, after the old school was demolished.

Demolitions are reasonably dramatic, and tend to be noticed. Neglect over many years tends not to be. The word neglect suggests we should blame someone, but as any owner of an older house knows, it isn’t always possible to secure older buildings perfectly against the elements. Particularly if someone steals the lead from a roof.

Shipton St School is presumably rotting a bit by now. It wasn’t looking too good when I took this photo back in 2007. Like St Barnabas school, it’s out in the terraced 19th-century suburbs, where the tourists don’t go, and people of power and influence aren’t seeing its boarded windows on a daily basis.

It could have been redeveloped earlier, perhaps, as the ArcLight centre wanted to move here, but … well, you can Google to find information on this unpopular suggestion. Its redevelopment as housing – keeping the main school buildings – was approved, but is another victim of the economic climate. The place is boarded up and inaccessible. In the brief period it was accessible it looked like the lead was being stolen from the roof, and that no one was much bothered.

So, the Bonding Warehouse and Shipton Street School remain empty. Both must have been so for around ten years now. One has had some weatherproofing work done, while the other apparently hasn’t. One of them is in the city centre where tourists see it, and one is in the Victorian suburbs where only the residents see it. It will be interesting to see developments, if any.

Does it matter if these buildings collapse and are gone from the landscape? They don’t bring in tourists, and you could say they’ve outlived their purpose. One was a warehouse on the river – we don’t need those anymore. One was a school, and its pupils have relocated to another school. They’re both handsome buildings, but we have a lot of those. And not everyone appreciates our recent history, which is what these buildings tell us about, if they tell us anything. The people they ’speak’ to are perhaps not the people who can do anything about their demise.

You could say it’s a shame they’re listed buildings. If they weren’t we could demolish them and build something more fit for purpose for the 21st century?

Obviously I don’t think that. But in difficult economic times, it seems reasonable to ask these questions. Should we attempt to retain and reuse these Victorian buildings, and if so, why? Victorian buildings are not rare, after all.

Your views?

More/links

Victorian buildings demolished since this website went online include St Barnabas School, mentioned above, and J B Morrell’s old house on Burton Stone Lane, just round the corner from Shipton St School. Please feel free to add others you know of, via the comments below.

The Victorian Society – campaigns to protect Victorian and Edwardian buildings, and is looking for nominations of endangered buildings. Should Shipton Street school be nominated?

Update: May 2013

Work on Shipton St School is now well underway. See all pages tagged Shipton St School

Update: April 2014

Work on the Bonding Warehouse is also now well underway. See all pages tagged Bonding Warehouse

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July 2009 (photos from 2007)

(Update: for later pages and more recent news see all pages tagged Shipton St School)

Shipton Street School has been empty for years. The buildings are to be converted into residential use, but work hasn’t yet begun.

A couple of summers ago I was passing one day and noticed the gates had been damaged, allowing access to the playground and rear of the buildings. These are normally not just inaccessible but unviewable, owing to the high brick walls.

I took the opportunity to take some photographs of the buildings, while this still looks like an old Victorian school. Though the buildings are to be retained in the new development, they’ll be changed, smartened up.

The school was designed by the architect Brierley, and is, according to the Pevsner guide, ‘an excellent early work’ from this architect. Brierley also designed the much-admired Scarcroft Road School, and many other school buildings of the period, including Park Grove and Fishergate.

When I wandered in I took only photos and left only footprints. But it seems others that had been in before me had left some destruction behind them, and it looks like lead may have been taken off the lower roofs. I hadn’t realised this at the time, only noticed later on the photos. Stealing lead from roofs was quite the thing at one time (and, sadly, remains a problem).

This is a very handsome building, not just functional but decorated with groovy little details and fancy bits, all quite playful really, which I guess befits a primary school. Many of the other Victorian schools by Brierley are still in use as schools a hundred years or more after they were built, which suggests that they’re not only rather nice-looking buildings but presumably designed on principles that endure the test of time.

Though that wasn’t enough to keep this example in use as a school.

The old playground will of course be removed – the plans I’ve seen suggest most of the area will be grassed over. So I’m glad I got to take photos of these playground markings before they’re gone. There’s snakes and ladders, and compass points, painted and fading on the tarmac. The tarmac is breaking up, and the usual weeds are taking hold. If it had been a dull and cloudy day it might have all seemed a bit desolate and depressing here, but in fact it felt like a happy kind of place. It’s hard to be glum when there’s a pink snake with a big yellow tongue painted on the floor.

Update – November 2011

It was reported last October that work on the school building had been delayed because of the economic situation: Start delayed at Shipton Street School development in York. The building is still unoccupied and boarded up.

Update – October 2012

See this page.

More recent updates …

… can be found here: all pages tagged Shipton St School

…..

Page compiled in July 2009. Photos taken in 2004 and 2007. Page last updated: April 2014.

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