YORK Civic Trust celebrated its 70th birthday a couple of weeks ago. This provided the perfect opportunity to have a rummage through some of the Trust’s early annual reports, which are full of photographs of York in the 1940s and early 1950s.

The Trust has allowed us to reproduce a selection above.

One of the Trust’s key founding aims was preservation. A preface to its first annual report of 1946/7 set this out clearly: “It has become evident that a society of watchmen is needed to help preserve what of ancient York we still possess,” it stated.

The document then went on to detail the very real threat to many of York’s older buildings.

“Since 1900, despite the efforts of generous and far-seeing individuals, the city has lost a number of interesting and characteristic buildings... which could have been saved, with or without difficulty, if its citizens had been aware of the danger, and had had the organisation to protect them or act in time,” it said.

“Still more buildings have been deprived of their dignity or beauty by additions needlessly out of type or taste or scale...The steady process of small changes without thought for the surrounding street or space will soon spoil a city, or rob it of charm and character.”

The first bound volume of the Civic Trust’s annual reports, which contains the reports for the first four years, is full of photographs of York buildings which are either at risk or which, thanks to timely preservation, have been saved.

One building, the Red House in Duncombe Place (today an antiques centre) was shown both before and after preservation. 

Some of the photographs illustrate the Trust's concerns of the time.
One shows buildings plastered with advertising hoardings: everything from Stork margarine to Persil and Cadbury's Whole Nut.

"The desolate scene at the south end of Skeldergate," says the caption - and desolate indeed is how it looked.

Another shows the 'squalor' of King's Square. "Ugly signposts arbitrarily placed, a monstrous electricity box, and the new flower bed which, alas, destroys the former spatial dignity of the Square," reads the caption to this photograph.

The street entertainers of today certainly wouldn't think much of that flower bed - and it must be admitted that the parked cars don't add much to the 'spatial dignity of the square' either.

That is certainly the case at Clifford's Tower today. The area between the east of the tower and the River Foss was also a car park in the 1950s, as the first of two photographs of the Eye of York reveals - although there don't seem to have been quite so many cars back then.

As to the allotments in front of the debtors' prison... we've had readers writing in to tell us about these before, but this is perhaps the best photograph we've seen so far.

The Civic Trust in the 1950s wasn't particularly concerned about the allotment, however; it was more worried about the condition of the famous building, which it described as 'perhaps the finest secular building in York'.

Part of the building had had to be closed because the foundations were slipping, the caption to the photograph says, adding: "Notice the cracks developing!"

The photographs taken from those 1950s Civic trust reports include:

  • High Petergate, a street which 'needs little to make and keep it perfect', notes the Civic Trust. We particularly love the sign promising 'cycles stored. 2d'. Clearly York was a cycling city back then as well...
  • A atmospheric Shambles, seen in a photograph actually taken in 1948
  • The 'rest garden' in Bootham. "This delightful rest garden was paved and grassed by the boys of Bootham School," reads the caption. "They also made the garden seat."
  • St Mary's Wall, looking rather unloved and run down.

In the 70 years since it was established, the Civic Trust has continued its work of preserving - and promoting better understanding of - York’s historic buildings and streets. But the photographs above of shabby, dilapidated buildings reveal just how big the challenge was in those early post-war years.