MOST of the houses in the South Bank area are long, straight streets of small houses opening directly onto pavements and connected by a network of back alleys. They were built in the late 1800s/ early 1900s for labourers and factory workers.

The exception is the Nunthorpe estate - a group of red brick semis built in the 1930s on a field between Bishopthorpe Road and Nunthorpe Grammar School.

In Shadows in the Bricks, the new book from the Clements Hall Local History Group which we dipped into last week, two locals remember that field.

"Access was by a five-barred gate just about where the road is now," recalled derrick Gray. "Most of the time cattle grazed in this field, and the occasional horse."

Keith Watson said his father remembered going to Scarcroft School over the fields in the early 1930s, "using the gate and passing the large pond which was about half way across. There were swans living on the pond at that time."

The pond was filled in when the Nunthorpe estate was built in the mid- to late 1930s - reported using stone from York prison, the walls of which were demolished in 1935.

The new estate was to prove ill-fated when war broke out, however. In fact, records Shadows in the Brick, Nunthorpe Grove has been described as the 'most ill-fated street in wartime York'.

It had proved impossible to build Anderson shelters on many parts of the new estate, because of the pond which had once been there. "Much of the ground was waterlogged, making it unsuitable."

That meant the residents were vulnerable to aerial bombardment.

It duly came, on April 29, 1942 - the night of the York blitz.

"A bomb dropped on Nos 23 and 25, destroying these, as well as Nos 19 and 21," records Shadows in the Bricks. "Several people were badly injured, and the body of a young ATS girl, Dorothy Thompson, was later found at the bottom of a bomb crater in No 21."

It wasn't the end of the Nunthorpe estate's wartime bad luck. On March 5, 1945, Halifax bombers from the Canadian 426 Squadron based at RAF Linton-on-Ouse took off to raid the German city of Chemnitz. The aircraft were covered in ice, however, and three crashed soon after take-off. One, which was carrying eight bombs, broke up under the weight of the ice on it, and the fuselage crashed onto Nos 26 and 28 Nunthorpe Grove, killing two elderly women. One of the engines, meanwhile, hit the nearby school. In all, 11 people died - six of the crew and five civilians - and another 18 were injured. Four houses were set on fire.

The late York historian Hugh Murray had a series of photographs showing the bomb damage on Nunthorpe Grove caused in the 1942 York Blitz - and the damage caused by the crashed Halifax in 1945. Four of those photos have made their way into Shadows in the Bricks, and we reproduce them here.

We also have three more photos from Shadow in the Bricks.

One shows the old lodge house for Nunthorpe Hall which stood on the corner of South Bank Avenue and Bishopthorpe Road in the early 1930s. Nunthorpe Hall itself, built in 1866/7 for the mining engineer Henry Johnson McCulloch and sometimes known as South Bank House or even 'Captain McCulloch's Mansion', was demolished in 1977. Long before that, however, in the early 1930s, the lodge building was being used as a newsagent. Bill posters on the front of the shop in the 1930s photo are fairly lurid. 'Missing girl: ghastly story' reads one: 'Boy trapped in burning train' and 'death drama in Yorkshire hotel' declare two others. The lodge was eventually demolished in the late 1930s, about 40 years before the hall itself.

Our final two photos show the former Lonsdale's grocery and drapery shop on the corner of Windsor Street and Ovington Terrace - and Mr Ernest Algernon Lonsdale himself, who took over the family business in the 1940s and ran it until about 1960.

Stephen Lewis

Shadows In The Bricks: The Old Shops of South Bank in York is written and published by the Clements Hall Local History Group. The book will be available from tomorrow, priced £7, from outlets throughout South Bank, including Clements Hall, Fred's Bakery, Tranquil Hair & Beauty, The Corner Barbershop, Tower Vets, The Winning Post, Pextons, Frankie and Johnny's Cookshop and Cameron Beaumont Opticians.