York's Mansion House undergoes a £1.5m restoration

YOU’VE heard the expression ‘built on sand’. Well, York’s famous Mansion House is, literally. The home of the city’s Lord Mayors has no proper foundations to speak of, says the house’s manager Richard Pollitt. And if you dig down a few metres, what you come to is sand. River sand, to be precise.

The centre of the great Georgian mansion is, therefore, very slowly beginning to sink. As you walk around the building, you can see cracks beginning to form - they are very noticeable in the arch that leads from the hall to the great staircase. “You can see where it is sinking, and it is cracking the arch,” Richard says.

An important part of the Mansion House’s £1.5 million restoration project - most of which, as The Press reported recently, is coming from a £1.2 million Heritage Lottery grant - will therefore involve underpinning the house to stop it sinking further.

From the basement, workmen will dig out one-metre sections. “Then they’ll drive piles into the sand, underpinning the walls,” Richard says.

This urgent repair work is only one part of a major project that will, over 13 months from this summer to next, see the great house transformed, however.

At the moment, not many people get to see inside the Mansion House. The Lord Mayor of the day entertains there - as he or she has done for centuries. And a couple of days a week there are guided tours of the building.

Following its makeover, however, the Mansion House will effectively become another - if very special - museum. It will be open every Wednesday to Sunday from 10.30am to 5pm. And visitors, on payment of a £6 entrance fee (free to anyone with a York Card) will be able to roam about the building virtually at will taking in the great dining room where the Lord Mayor entertains guests; the state room where civic functions were once held; the minstrels’ gallery which looks down into the state room; the robing room; drawing rooms such as the yellow room; and even the kitchens. There will also be audio tours available and - for those who would prefer them - guided tours.

The Mansion House in York

The Mansion House will still be the home of the Lord Mayor, Richard stresses - so the Lord Mayor’s flat will remain off limits. But visitors will be allowed virtually everywhere else on days when the house is open. The aim will be for it to become a centre for learning about civic democracy and the role of York’s Lord Mayor - in the house where the Mayor still lives and entertains.

The restoration project will begin at the end of August, when the house will be closed and all the furniture, fittings, and gold and silver will be taken into storage. There will be an ‘open week’ in the last week of September, which will give people the chance to see the great Georgian mansion completely empty: and then the house will be closed until October 2016 for the the work proper to begin.

There will be four main elements to the Mansion House restoration project: The Kitchens Few people have ever seen the kitchens in which, for centuries, dinner was cooked for the Lord Mayor and the guests he (or she) entertained - guests who have included a former Prince Regent.

The old iron range in the kitchen of the Mansion House

An artist’s impression of how the Mansion House’s restored Georgian kitchen could look

The kitchen today is very much a ‘below stairs’ part of the house - rather shabby and run down. But there are some wonderful things down there: a cast iron range; some Georgian kitchen tables that have been covered with cheap plastic or vinyl; a collection of battered Britannia metal tea and coffee pots dating from the 1880s which hang along one wall.

Britannia metal was a kind of cheap alternative to silver, Richard explains. The pots should be shiny, although they’re not any longer.

They are, however, all stamped with the word ‘Ebor’: and they are all dented in precisely the same place, around the sides.

“That’s because of the way they were carried, two in each hand so that they banged together,” Richard says.

A row of Britannia metal jugs

The kitchens are to be completely restored, creating two ‘new’ kitchens. One will be a modern working kitchen, which will be used to cook for the Lord Mayor and his guests. The other will be a fully restored, fully working 18th century kitchen, that will give visitors a real insight into what life was like below stairs.

The original stone floor will be uncovered; the Georgian kitchen tables will be stripped back to their original wood; there will be a new, working range built from the original Georgian designs; and original kitchen equipment from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries: knives, meat-cleavers, grinders, teapots and coffee pots. The range will be kept lit, so that visitors will be able to feel the heat and warmth of a Georgian kitchen, Richard says: and there will be recipes, and demonstrations , and a table laid as if for a meal. “We’ll be taking it back to its heyday.”

The butler’s pantry which opens off the kitchen will also be restored, as will some parts of the basement - including a meat store complete with meat hooks and faded blue paint. “They thought blue kept flies away.”

The lower basement, beneath the passage which runs past the Mansion House to the Guildhall, may itself be restored in a second, later phase of work.

It was once the beer cellar, Richard says. Much of the stonework lining the walls is medieval. and standing in here, you can sometimes hear the footsteps of people passing above on their way to the Guildhall.

The gold and silver

The Mansion House has a wonderful collection of gold and silver: Elizabethan ‘pottage’ spoons dating from the late 1500s; a pair of glorious silver tankards, gifted to the Lord Mayor in 1672 by Thomas Bawtry; and a wealth of other spoons, cutlery, tankards, salvers and other silverware.

At the moment this treasure is kept firmly locked in a huge walk-in Chubb safe within the house itself: and virtually the only person who ever sees it is Richard.

That will all change.

Two rooms up on the first floor - one of them the ‘Blue Room’ - will be converted to display the house’s collection of gold, silver and jewellery. One entire wall of the Blue Room will be the ‘Ebor’ wall, in which hundreds of pieces of gold and silver cutlery will spell out the word Ebor. and there will also be glass display cases and an activities space.

Richard Pollitt casts an eye over some of the silver tankards

There will also be information about the gold- and silversmiths who made the pieces, many of them natives of York.

The aim, says Richard, will be to “provide the means to learn about the people behind the objects, the York silver smiths, the donors and patrons.”

Conservation

In addition to underpinning the centre of the house, the whole building will be electrically rewired, and a new fire alarm system will be put in.

The outside of the building will be repainted, although it won’t look much different; public rooms with which you might be familiar - the dining room, the state room etc - will be refreshed, although again they won’t look much different to now.

One difference you might notice is that the old storage heaters which have been used for heating - and which have caused damaged and cracking to walls - will be taken out and a new, green-friendly heating system installed.

The aim of the conservation element of the project, says Richard, will be to ensure the building “never gets in this state again.”

Oral History

A major Oral History project will be launched, to collect memories of those who have worked in or had connections to the house.

“We want to capture the memories of the butlers, the cleaners, the cooks and those who have working in the house, along with the Lord mayors and Sheriffs,”Richard says.

• The Mansion House will close at the end of August this year. it will be emptied of its contents, and in the last week of September there will be an open week, where people can come along for free to see what a Georgian mansion looks like when empty. The restoration work will then be carried out, before the house reopens in October 2016.

History of the Mansion House

York’s Mansion House was the first ‘civic residence’ to be built in England - pre-dating even London’s. It was built in the mid 1720s, while that in London only followed suit in 1752, according to the ‘History of York’ website.

The aim of the house was to be a place where the Lord Mayor could entertain guests. Until it was built, successive Lord Mayors were supposed to entertain guests in their own homes. but this caused problems. The Lord Mayor’s silver and gold tableware had to be passed from house to house - and quite a lot went missing or was damaged along the way, says Richard Pollitt.

On top of that, some Lord Mayors objected to opening up their own homes to guests and for the entertainment of the citizens.

The council decided that the Guildhall was too old-fashioned a civic centre for a fashionable city. An attempt was made to buy Sir William Robinson’s house, on the corner of Duncombe Place and St. Leonard’s Place, according to the History of York website. But this failed. Shortly afterwards the order to build a new house on Coney Street was approved. The budget – soon exceeded – was £1,000.

The Mansion House symbolised York’s role as a stylish and lavish host to society. It was built in the most fashionable new Palladian style. Although originally used mainly as a place for entertaining guests, by the 1900s it had become the Lord Mayor’s official residence - and remains so to this day.