ST Andrewgate, which links King’s Square with Aldwark, has been a part of York’s network of ancient streets for a very long time.

According to Press reader Peter A Jackson, who grew up there, the earliest record of it dates from 1175, when it was known as Ketmangergate – or the “street of horse flesh dealers”.

By the 1960s, however, it had fallen on hard times. The Esher report, published in 1969, was damning.

“The most decrepit thoroughfare in central York,” is how it described the street.

To Peter, however, it is simply where he grew up.

His family lived in St Andrewgate – at several different addresses – for more than 50 years, from 1880 to 1938. His Grandfather Booth – James Booth – was a bargeman who lived at No 41.

His mother, Edith, was born at No 3, and his sister, Mary, at No 5, where Peter himself lived until he was six.

He remembers the house as being very tall – taller than other most other buildings in the street. It had once, a good while before, belonged to a well-off York councillor, he believes.

There were two cooking ranges in the cellar, which would probably once have been used by servants, and a kitchen and sitting room on the ground floor. Up above were two bedrooms, and above that again attics.

There was no bathroom, however – the family washed in the kitchen – and no indoor loo: you had to go into the yard.

He has a grainy photograph from the 1930s which shows him as a very young boy, sitting beside his sister on the front step of No 3. “I’d be about two years old sitting on that step,” says the retired motor mechanic, who now lives off Shipton Road.

Following demolitions and house clearances in the 1970s, St Andrewgate today looks very different to the street Peter grew up in.

Thankfully, Mr Jackson is passionate about history.

He’s an accredited Minster guide, a city guide, and was one of the first stewards at Barley Hall. And now he’s compiled a history of St Andrewgate, complete with a series of photos of how it looked from the 1930s to the 1960s.

We reproduce a few of those photos here, together with a few from our own archives showing the street during the “demolition years”.

St Andrewgate is certainly a street with an interesting history.

The church from which it gets its name – St Andrews – was spared the fate of some other York churches, which were demolished in the 1540s on the orders of King Henry VIII, Peter writes.

But its fate was little better.

“The church was closed in 1548 and was sold to the city council in 1581, when its status took a steep decline by becoming first a brothel, then a livery stable.”

Later, before the civil war, it was for a time home to St Peter’s School.

“The building still stands to this day, and reverted back to a religious building,” Peter writes.

In the early 1800s, the York Dispensary – which had been set up in the Merchant Adventurer’s Hall to dispense medicine to the poor and needy – bought a house in St Andrewgate which served as an early hospital.

“There were 31,000 patients treated in the first 25 years of its existence,” Peter writes.

York’s first police station was established in St Andrewgate in 1826, and St Andrewgate National School for infants was opened in St Andrew’s Hall in 1829.

During the First World War the drill hall was used as a receiving post for wounded soldiers coming home from France.

But by the time Peter came on the scene, the street – which in the 16th century had been entered through an archway from King’s Square – was in decline.

He distinctly remembers that at some point – he thinks it must have been after the Second World War, by which time he was no longer living there – a row of six cottages was put up for sale for the princely sum of £60.

“Nobody wanted them!” he says. “ They all had outside loos.”

By the 1960s, and that damning Esher report, most of the street’s inhabitants had already moved out, paving way for the demolitions and rebuilding which followed, and which led to the street as we have it today.