READER and local historian Peter Stanhope has been in touch about the photograph we carried last week showing the old Botterills horse and carriage repository on Tanner Moat being demolished in 1962.

Originally Walker’s horse and carriage repository, it first appeared in about 1850 following the opening of Lendal Bridge as an access to George Hudson’s ‘new’ railway station – later the Station Hotel and now the city council HQ.

“The Repository was the equivalent of a multi-storey parking place for horses and ground floor parking for carriages well before cars had been invented,” Peter says. “It was also a place to rent a horse or a carriage, much like nowadays parking or renting a car at the railway station.”

The exterior was designed in a distinctive Moorish style of decorative brickwork arches. Originally three stories tall and decorated with a pinnacle, it was considered by some to be ‘the ugliest building in York’ at the time, Peter says.

We can’t imagine why. With Peter’s help we tracked down a couple of photos of Tanner Moat in 1955 in the York city archive, both showing the horse depository before it was demolished. It seems to have been an ornate and rather exotic building which while certainly unusual must have been a pleasing addition to the York skyline – and something of a landmark.

York Press:

BRIDGE VIEW: The view from Lendal Bridge towards Tanner Moat and Rougier Street in about 1955, showing the tall shape of the Botterills horse repository. Photo courtesy of York city archive

Peter distinctly remembers visiting monthly horse auction sales at Botterills as a boy of about ten.

“As a lad I lived in Bishophill,” he says.

“I used to go down to the sales and, having a love of horses from my first donkey rides at Scarborough and Filey, and also ponies at garden fetes at The Homestead, I used to enjoy getting close to them at these sales. I got to know some of the stable lads who looked after the horses and, through them, got to water and brush the horses down. Eventually, I even got to ride them, exercising them up and down the riverside between Lendal Bridge and Scarborough Bridge. I was a cheeky little beggar!

York Press:

DEMOLITION: The half demolished remains of Botterills Horse and Carriage depository as photographed on May 24, 1962

“The repository itself was a very ornate place with a spiral ramp for taking horses up to the second storey stalls. The ground floor had originally been parking spaces for carriages but, by my time in the 1950s, it was more horse stalls and the area where the horse auction itself was conducted.”

The frontage of the repository building still exists, although truncated now because the upper stories and the elegant gable have been removed and replaced by a flat-topped modern extension, Peter says. “But the distinctive Moorish archways are still there – right next to the Maltings pub!”