We turn our attention to Museum Street and the Museum Gardens this week - for no reason other than that we found a couple of great old photos of Museum Street tucked away in a browning envelope in our office. A quick online search yielded some more - sop here we are...

Our favourite of the photographs has to be the 1955 one showing traffic in Museum Street. The picture shows a cluster of double decker busies, plus two rivers of cyclists, one going one way, the other going the other.

The sheer number of cyclists suggests that they are determining the speed at which the buses and the couple of cars visible are able to travel. It's almost as if the cars are there on sufferance... which is surely a good thing. Perhaps the secret to cars and bikes being able to share a road successfully is to ensure there are enough bikes to act as natural brakes on the cars...

Another great example of different modes of transport sharing the same road can be seen in the wonderful photograph of an electric tram and a horse-drawn carriage queuing to turn left into St Leonard's Place from Museum Street, we would guess some time in the early 1910s (electric trams didn't enter service in York until 1910). York Minster looms majestic in the background.

We have a couple of photographs showing the corner of Lendal and Museum Street. One, taken in what we think was possibly 1958 (though it may be earlier) shows a policeman in a long white coat conducting traffic (of which there isn't very much). The Prudential Insurance Building stands on the corner, with the Farmers Insurance Office rising above. A second photograph was clearly taken some time later, when the buildings on the corner had been demolished. Do any readers remember when this happened?

To round things off, we also managed to find (on Explore York's wonderful Imagine York online archive) some great photos of Museum Gardens. One shows the gatehouse on the Museum Street entrance to the gardens, which was designed in 1874 by George Fowler Jones. The photograph dates from the 1880s, and the caption described the gatehouse as 'an engaging piece of Victorian nonsense'. It's surely better than that?

We also have a couple of images from inside the gardens themselves. One dates from the 1860s (ie the very early days of photography) and shows a photographer standing amidst the ruins of St Mary's Abbey, sizing up a picture. It shows just how long these picturesque ruins have been attracting visitors. The second dates from the 1930s and shows the Yorkshire Museum and the abbey ruins neatly framed by a tree and a carefully-trended flower bed people, though...

Stephen Lewis