Look up in central York and, above the shopfronts, you’ll see all kinds of evidence of the city’s architectural and social history. Georgian brickwork and sash windows are quite frequent (I think there are some Georgian sash windows reflected in the upper-level glazing of the building in my photograph). Tudor or earlier timber framing can also be found with ease – with great ease as its black and white patterns readily catch the eye. Here’s something different, a legacy of York’s later history. Above the frontages of the Yorkshire Building Society and Motto Sushi is a facade that’s nearly all glass, held together with iron beams and slender columns and punctuated with still more slender glazing bars.
The generous iron eaves cornice at the top allies the building to classical culture, but the proportions of the rest are not at all classical – this is a structure of the industrial age, and it shows. Its builders have put the technology of the railways and factories to use in a shopping street – this was a substantial multi-storey shop, with upper windows in which large goods such as furniture could be displayed. It’s the shop as showroom, and 100 years ago made a bold architectural statement amongst the brick and timber facades, although most people now barely notice it.
The building was completed in 1885. The architect was called W. Brown* and the framework he specified was manufactured by York’s Thomlinson Walker foundry – the foundry incorporated their name into the structure’s right-hand upright, where it can still be seen (albeit made less distinct by successive coast of paint), low down on the base.† The presence of the founder’s ‘signature’ draws attention to the fact that in spite of the modern shopfronts, the whole structure, from pavement level to cornice, is still very much intact.
The other key element in this facade is of course the glass. This is plate glass, the production of which had come on in leaps and bounds since the Great Exhibition of 1851, when a huge quantity of the material was produced for London’s Crystal Palace. So the technology was well up to speed by the 1880s. Even so, using such large sheets of glass with such slender supports was unusual – Pevsner refers to the facade as ‘a remarkably radical piece of work’. True. It’s well worth craning one’s neck to take a look, though many will draw the line at getting down on one knee as I did to take a picture of the founder’s name.
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* I wonder if he was the William Brown listed as ‘architect and sanitary engineer’ in York in the late-Victorian period.
† This foundry’s reach extended far beyond York – they made the railings at London’s National Gallery.
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