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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The building work on West Offices is finished (outside, fitting out the inside will take a little longer). These photos were taken from the city walls in late November.

The view towards York Minster is one of the most photographed and familiar views, from the wall walk beginning at Micklegate Bar. The new building is certainly striking, and dominant. This, of course, is the City of York Council’s new headquarters, and it definitely says confidently ‘21st century town hall’. Within it the surviving parts of the city’s first proper railway station – the one built in the 1840s which, within a decade or two, was found to be inadequate. Let’s hope this isn’t the case this time.

Again, those of us with family connections to York’s railway history may feel a little sad. After its time as the railway station it was railway offices. My dad worked here. It’s not that long ago that it was the workplace of many railway staff, as was the building opposite, the fancy one in red brick with stone details. Some years back that became a hotel, and now the transformation of the area is complete.

The red brick railway offices used to be the most dominant building, now the council HQ is, confidently striding into the foreground, all big and bright. In the view above York Minster looks like a mousy little thing in the background.

Alongside the new HQ on the far side, on Tanner Row/Toft Green, is the new hotel shown to the right of this photo. From Tanner Row it looked hideous and forbidding: it shows its best side to the city walls.

The lower part of the HQ building, in the foreground, is a large bike shed, incorporating some of the iron columns from the station buildings originally on the site.

Moving round a bit, this is the new part of the HQ building facing the walls, with the original station/West Offices part off to the left.

Moving along a little further, this view of the railway memorial and the two ‘railway offices’ looks very similar to before, apart from the higher modern roof on West Offices to the right.

The paving has been replaced around the development, and when I visited the repaving was continuing along Station Rise in front of the war memorial.

In case anyone’s struggling to remember how it looked before, here’s one I took earlier. February 2004: Hudson House to the right, with the rather small-scale West Offices, all rather ‘unplanned’ looking, with bits added on over the years, including a modern addition which bridges the space where the railway lines once were.

And now, 2012.

I hope these are of interest to readers who no longer live in York but who like to keep up with developments. This is probably the most dramatic one I’ve seen recently.

Contrasts

The ‘before’ and ‘after’ isn’t the only contrast I’m thinking of, while making this page. The other is between the lavish refurbishment of parts of our railway heritage, up here on Station Rise, while down the road out of town demolition of another part of it is taking place with barely anyone noticing. These railway buildings within the walls are worth so much, the ones down Leeman Road worth nothing.

Elsewhere on this site

An earlier visit, August 2011, wandering about around the building site

Elsewhere on the web

There are larger versions of some of the views above in my Picasaweb album

Key moment as developers handover West Offices to City of York Council – yorkmix.com

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If you know York well, you’ll know that it’s not usual to see buses and other everyday through-traffic on this short stretch of road between the two ‘railway offices’. (For decades they were known as such, now the one on the left is the Cedar Court Grand Hotel, and West Offices is to be the new City of York Council HQ.)

At one end of this short road are ornate gates, and if you’re observant you’ll have noticed that on the wall at either end are small signs referring to the ‘Highways Act 1959′, and declaring that this is not a public right of way.

It’s still a private road. The Cedar Court Grand refer to the ‘private road’ status when answering queries regarding parking on tripadvisor.com.

Who owns it now? Do the ‘British Railways Board’ still exist? Do they own lots of random small bits of road all over Britain?

So, back to the bus. The private road was opened to traffic during one of the floods. Before our flood defences were installed/improved, the river levels in the city centre rose so high as to flood streets close to the rivers. Rougier Street, the normal bus route which runs parallel to this road, was presumably so flooded as to be impassable.

This opening of the ‘gated close’ to everyday traffic was clearly of interest to the railway office workers, one of whom was my dad. This photo was taken from an upstairs window of West Offices, in January 1982.

Any memories of this/information on the quirky little ‘BR’ road, please leave a comment.

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August 2011

It’s ‘all change’ round here, as a station guard might have said back in the mid-19th century when this was our railway station.

The redevelopment of this building – more recently known as ‘West Offices’ – is underway, to form a new headquarters building for City of York Council.

The site is easily viewed from Toft Green/Tanner Row on one side and from the bar walls on the other. I had a wander alongside it via the gates near the war memorial, where small windows in the wooden hoardings offer more close-up views. The windows are of plastic, and this being a building site they’re not suprisingly somewhat dusty, so these views are rather blurry. But I liked the way the windows offered a ready-made frame for views of the site, and of the former railway offices across the road.

The building known as West Offices was originally our railway station, before the current station outside the walls replaced it. The windows in the hoardings gave views of some of the architectural details from the original building. As it was used as railway offices for decades, various modern additions had presumably obscured some of these Victorian details.

The platforms and rail lines used to occupy the space now occupied by a massive steel structure, part of the new additions being built around and alongside the Victorian buildings.

I’ve taken photos a few times when passing. These wider views of the site, showing the development over the last six months, can be enlarged if you click on them.

Left – seen from the bar walls, in early March, when various bits of more modern structure were apparently being demolished.

Below left – about a month ago, late July, seen from the other side on Toft Green.

Below right – roughly the same view, in late August, with concrete foundations in place (for an adjoining hotel, I think).

Another view of the site, from the city walls, in March 2011. At one time steam trains would have stopped in front of those windows. Hargrove’s guide of 1844 has an evocative description of the station, just a few years after it opened:

The 1844 Hargrove guide also said: ‘It is an extensive and splendid structure, and is not excelled by any station in the kingdom for convenient arrangement, and suitable adaptation to all the requisite purposes.’ Let’s hope we can bestow similar praise on it once it’s remodelled as the City Council headquarters.

There’s been an archaeological dig on the site – uncovering Roman remains. There are some really nice photos of the finds on Flickr.com.

There’s been a lot of digging here – and not always related to archaeology or building work. Gardens and a plant nursery once occupied this site. But that’s a story for another time.

Links, related pages etc

There’s a detailed plan of the layout of the old railway station on the 1852 plan of York – available online at https://yorkmaps.net/1852/

The station building which replaced it is of course still in use, and I’ve recently included an appreciation of the railway station, having wandered into it via one of the new cycle/pedestrian routes.

A brief page on the current council offices recognises that the building on St Leonard’s Place isn’t really appropriate for a 21st century city council.

Also on this site are pages compiled some years back (2004) with more photos and information on the railway buildings in the area – the railway offices and the station. See: Railway City and Station Rise. In some respects a little out of date, but may be of interest.

Update – since added, more on the history of this site, in York’s early nurserymen.

There are several later pages, under the tag ‘West Offices‘, added since this page was compiled.

. . . . .

Page compiled August 2011. Updated: 8 Feb 2013 and (updated links) 23 Nov 2018.

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