A COUPLE of weeks ago on the features pages of The Press we carried a piece about the latest community collections at the city archives which had been catalogued and made available to the public.

This included material given to the archives by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society — not the society’s collected papers, as we suggested, but simply a collection of documents that had been passed to the society in the 19th century.

“The society’s own archives, its ‘collected papers’... are lodged at the Borthwick Institute,” said the philosophical society’s archivist Bob Hale.

Among the documents passed to the city archives, and which we described in our article, was an extraordinary passport belonging to a Mr (not Sir) John Bownas Atkinson.

It seemed to date from the late 1820s, and suggested Mr Atkinson had been on a Grand Tour of Italy, receiving stamps in his passport from various Italian cities.

Mr Atkinson and his brother William (usually referred to together as JB and W Atkinson) succeeded their father Peter (and his father Peter senior before him) in the firm of the great architect John Carr, Mr Hale said.

“One of JB and W’s best known buildings is York County Hospital off Monkgate, now apartments, near Sainsbury’s,” Mr Hale added. “JB was taken into partnership in 1831, not long after his Grand Tour, evidently. He later became a YPS member like his father!”