York, Feasegate

Iron on display

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.

Iron foundry name on base of column

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.

- - - - -

* 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.

York, Rowntree Park

 

Gate of peace

I thought, when I first caught site of this structure in York’s Rowntree Park, that it must have been moved here from elsewhere. It looked old, with its silvered oak timbers and melllow bricks – certainly older than the date of 1919–21, when Rowntree and Company donated the park to the city as a memorial to its workers who fell in World War I. The structure’s similarity to a church lychgate, and the fact that it does not stand at the entrance to the park but within it, added to my confusion.

Looking more closely, though, I could see that things were not quite as they seemed. Although there is a timber framework, the side walls have a much larger area of brick than in a medieval or Tudor timber-framed building – those bricks are doing much of the heavy lifting. And it turns out that this gateway was built for the park, its architect probably being Fred Rowntree or W. J. Swain, as in the nearby multi-purpose house and café building in my previous post. Material online about the park does, however, confusingly refer to it as a lychgate, the structure traditionally marking the entrance to a churchyard, where at funerals, the bearers may rest with the coffin, before proceeding on to the church (‘lych’ being an old word for corpse).

In fact it is a gateway from the outer part of the park, where the café stands, to a quieter inner area, a garden with a water feature, a statue of Mercury and an ample supply of benches, where one might rest and indeed remember those who laid down their lives in war, as the Rowntree family clearly intended. I have begun to think of it as a lychgate to a memorial garden, that garden being the horticultural equivalent of a cenotaph.

The gateway’s simple vernacular structure does this job well, aided by two further powerfully suggestive elements. Inside are two brass plaques, describing the donation of the park after World War I and the further donation of some fine wrought-iron gates after World War II. The first plaque is in retrospect very sad, expressing at it does the hope that the first conflict might be the ‘end of war’ and that the creation of the League of Nations might be the crowning post-war achievement. In the light of subsequent events, a further suggestive symbol is perhaps more powerful: in the roof of the lychgate is a dovecote – the entrances for the birds are just visible in the gable end – and white doves still flutter in and out. At least these delicate creatures endure, living symbols of peace, both peace in general and the peace of the garden that the Quaker Rowntrees shared with those of us who survive.

York, Rowntree Park

Ice cream, confectionery and books

‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream,’ wrote the American poet Wallace Stevens. This arresting line brought enquiries, including one from the US Amalgamated Ice Cream Association, no less, who no doubt wanted to know the poet’s precise meaning. But on a blisteringly hot afternoon in York, anyone who could sell us a good tub of the cold stuff would be high in our estimation indeed. A walk away from the crowded city centre towards Rowntree Park, in search of shade, nature and ice cream, seemed a good idea. I was sure there would be something of architectural interest along the way.

The Quaker Rowntree family, confectioners of renown, had their factory in York and were great benefactors to the city. After World War I, Jospeh Rowntree gave the 25-acre park as a memorial to the members of his staff who lost their lives in the war. He liked the idea of a place of quiet contemplation, and also of a recreational area accessible to all, and his architects set out the park with gardens, trees, a lake, large areas of lawn and places to play sports and games. It’s still popular today, even when a succession of heatwaves has dried the grass and much of the planting to a sorry crisp. In charge of the layout were two architects, Fred Rowntree and W. J. Swain. Fred Rowntree was from a branch of the family that lived in Scarborough and were cousins of the confectioners. He trained in his home town and designed numerous buildings in York as well as in London, which he later made his base.

Rowntree is said to have been the designer of the building in my photograph. It’s a multi-purpose structure. At the top is accommodation for the park keeper that looks out over the lake and gardens in the middle of the park. At the bottom are the open arches of what was originally a boat house. The middle part of the building, including the single-storey wing to the right, was designed as a café and still plays that role. It’s now the Explore Rowntree Park Reading Café. A café with books, no less, a relatively recent idea, but one that would no doubt have pleased the early Rowntrees. The whole was built just after World War I and completed in c. 1921. It’s a pleasant building, with casement windows, round-headed doorway and arches, and tall pantile roofs, that looks well amongst the surrounding trees and shrubs. It seems to evoke that moment in English architecture when traditional materials (brick, tile, render) combine with a plain, unornamented style to create something that has a hint of the old and a bit of the new too. The café also sells excellent ice cream.

York, Oglethorpe

 

All done in brick

Glancing up a York backstreet called Oglethorpe, I caught sight of this, a brick building of 1648, to which a pair of curvy, Dutch-style gables with dormer windows were added a bit later in the 17th century. It is said to be the earliest house in York built completely of brick, although bricks had been used extensively in eastern England by the time it was built. The Dutch gables give the house its name (it’s called the Dutch House) and cap a pleasant facade in which almost everything, from the door surround to the window mullions, the central oriel to the pediments above each window, is fashioned out of brick. A pantile roof completes the composition of orangey-red clay.

All those bold brick details give the building the air of the style known as Artisan Mannerism, although this style is typically applied to grander buildings incorporating brick scrolls, mouldings, and chunky eaves-cornices. Another house once called Dutch, the palace in Kew Gardens, is such a building at the grand end of the scale, Wilberforce House in Hull is a middling example. But something like York’s Dutch House, enlivening a quiet street, is certainly an eyecatcher. It has had a varied history. Starting as an impressive individual house, it was later divided into three separate dwellings, before becoming part of John Smith’s brewery. Needless to say, numerous internal alterations were made during the building’s first 300 years.

In the 1950s, Smith’s wanted to demolish the house, but the York Civic Trust restored it and it’s now a holiday home available to rent. It looks to be an excellent refuge in the city centre as well as a visual asset to the street. Convenience, history and style – it sounds like a good combination.

York, Foss Gate

The view from the pavement

When I go to a city that’s new to me, or one I’ve not visited for years, one of the things I do is stroll around randomly and look out for any interesting buildings that I come across. I’m taking a leaf out of the flâneur’s* book, if you like, although I have also read guidebooks and the pages of Pevsner in advance, so there are specific buildings I’m looking out for too. I York the other week, I was on one of my wonders when this building hit me between the eyes. I’d seen it in a book already and it was somewhere in the back of my mind, but for the moment I’d forgotten exactly where I was and so find it at that moment was a surprise. It hit me between the eyes and I needed to spend a few minutes taking it in.

It was built in 1911 as the Electric Cinema, York’s first purpose-built picture house, films having been shown in the city before, but in places built for some other purpose. 1911 is early for a cinema and there was no consensus about what such a building should look like but the large arch, symbolically welcoming the potential cinema-goer and adorned with luxurious-looking decoration, is the focus of more than one early cinema facade. This frontage plays that role. It’s supported on Ionic columns and describes a gentle curve that is very much of its Edwardian period. It’s decked out with swags of fruit and topped with a face modelled on an actor’s mask from the ancient Greek theatre. This ornament is ceramic, and was supplied by Doulton’s, a large amount of whose output was architectural faience.

What’s within the arch has changed. Where there are now doors and windows were once ticket booths, a signboard indicating what film was showing inside, the entrance doorways, and a great deal more faience decoration. It’s a shame that all this has gone, but the pattern of cinema history intervened. After functioning as the Electric, the place carried on under other owners, eventually being renamed the Scala Super Cinema (see the name of the adjoining alley, Scala Yard), but the decline in filmgoing that came with the television age led to the its closure.† For some time it was furniture shop and now, like so many city buildings, it’s made over to the hospitality industry. Now there are chairs and tables out front, where the flâneur may pause, enjoy a drink, and watch the people go by. 

- - - - -

* An originally French term for an urban stroller or loiterer, ‘a gentleman stroller of the city streets’, as Baudelaire put it, who walks around a city with no apparent aim apart from people-watching and taking in the atmosphere of the place. The feminine equivalent is flâneuse.

† I’m indebted to the cinema treasures website for some of this information.