ANTHONY Adamson started his fire-raising journey at Foss Park Psychiatric Hospital when he started a blaze in its lobby and set fire to a cushion outside. Then he left.

In Huntington Road, he spotted a Jaguar parked outside its owner's home and set fire to its cover. The owner, seeing flames rising from his car, rushed out and managed to put the fire out.

Adamson, 34, of no fixed abode, targeted a terrace of three houses and a hotel in the city centre.

Inside one of the middle houses, Eleanor Whittaker said she heard someone banging on her front door, but thinking it was someone going home from the pub did not answer it.

The next morning, her neighbours told her how contents in the recycling bins she had left in her porch near a gas main had been set on fire.

"I slept through the whole thing," she told the jury.

Adamson called out: "I didn't know the gas pipe was there".

After midnight, Adamson was at Our Lady's Row in Goodramgate where he set fire to rubbish by an exterior storeroom door.

Two unknown men spotted the blaze and ran to put it out with buckets of water.

Firefighters arrived but were unable to save the door which had to be boarded up.