THIS week we take our third and final look back at the history of New Earswick, courtesy of Colin Carr’s excellent book, New Earswick Revisited.

New Earswick is not the first area of York that springs to mind when talking about floods, it must be admitted.

But our first two photographs, taken in Rowan Place in 1933, show that the people of New Earswick have proved just as robust as anyone else in York when it comes to dealing with rising flood waters.

One shows a boy in what appears to be a homemade canoe, perhaps ferrying people to dry land and/or delivering food to stranded householders. Another shows Suttil's Dairy delivering milk by horse and cart, watched by a bedraggled group of onlookers.

Look carefully and you can see that some of the house windows have been thrown open “to presumably allow fresh air to reduce the smell of floodwater and dry out the ground floor”, writes Colin.

A popular visitor in the 1930s, especially with the children, was the ice cream man.

“They would all get excited and shout: ‘Here comes Kilvo’,” writes Colin. “I think his real name must have been Kilvington.”

Our picture shows “Kilvo” doing a roaring trade in Chestnut Grove in the 1930s.

And finally, we have a photograph of “the class of 1952” – the children of New Earswick Primary School gathered before the school in 1952. Colin himself went to the school as a boy. “I remember a rare treat when we were taken to the Folk Hall to see Muffin the Mule, a popular children’s television programme in the 1950s,” he writes.

• New Earswick Revisited, by Colin Carr, is printed by York Publishing Services and is available, priced £8, from New Earswick Folk Hall, Huntington Post Office, Kardz card shop in Brockfield Park Drive, or direct from the author on 01904 763194. Photographs courtesy of Colin and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation library.