York’s New Walk is a tree-lined path running south along the bank of the River Ouse that was new in the 1730s. It was laid out as a recreational path, a pleasant route for visitors who fancied leaving behind for an hour or so the hustle and bustle of the city centre. In the recent heatwave, the Resident Wise Woman looked at her map and found the path and thought it would be just the route for us after a hectic morning in the city centre. The shade alone (provided by a mixture of original trees and ones planted to replace elms killed in the Dutch elm disease outbreak of the 1970s) meant that we were glad to follow in the footsteps of our 18th-century forebears.
Soon I was surprised to find a chunky stone archway set to one side of the walk. The plain semi-circular opening was set in quite rough masonry, with battered side walls and buttresses adding strength. The structure is small but somehow imposing and the roughness of surface seemed to be calculated to create this effect by someone who knew what he was doing. We’d stumbled upon a well house, originally designed by the eminent architect John Carr of York, although it’s said by some to have been wholly or partly rebuilt a few years later by the City Surveyor, Thomas Pickersgill. Whoever was responsible for the structure we can see today seems to have based the design on the grottoes commonly found in country house parks and gardens, and the masonry is said to be made up of medieval stones reused from the demolished part of a medieval church. A damaged 12th-century capital was salvaged from this material and placed as the finial in the centre of the parapet.
The well-head, locally known as the Pikeing Well (I have not seen a plausible explanation of this name), is slightly later than the New Walk itself, and was built in 1752. This was a time when spas were becoming increasingly popular – many people flocked to spas that dispensed mineral-rich waters and cities such as Bath grew rich on the income from visitors who prized the water’s healing powers. Although York has no such mineral spa, the water from the spring at New Walk did have a reputation for curing eye diseases. So the authorities commissioned Carr to build this structure over an existing well, to form a kind of spa. Inside, Carr paced steps down to a stone-lined pool, giving access to the reputedly healing liquid. Whatever the facts about the water, the well was officially closed in 1929. Only the striking well house remains.
This is the last of my current series of posts about buildings in York. I have more to say about the city, and will no doubt write more posts in the future, but variety is the spice of this blog, and regular readers may appreciate some variation in the diet. So stand by for something different, architecturally and geographically, soon.
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