The ornate street lamp that was knocked down by a driver in Minster Gates last Monday may have been the last survivor of a whole network of similar lamps installed to bring electric light to York city centre after the city’s Foss Islands power station opened in 1900.
John Shaw, the chairman of the Yorkshire Architectural & York Archaeological Society (YAYAS), says that in the early 1900s the distinctive wrought-iron art-nouveau lamps could be seen across the city centre, from Ouse Bridge to Parliament Street, Deangate and Goodramgate.
Photographs still remain of many of them.
They were definitely electric lights, not gas lamps, John says – they were far too tall to be gas. “If they were gas lamps, how would you have lit them?”
An electric lamp in 1904, when Deangate was being constructed
That’s why he believes they must have been installed following the opening of the York Power Station – known at the time as the York Electric Lighting Station – in Foss Islands in February 1900.
The station’s purpose was to bring about the ‘electric lighting of the city’, according to a news report of the time.
John believes a series of wrought-iron electric lamps must have been commissioned to bring the new-fangled electric light to the city’s streets.
The ornate, art-nouveau design of the top of the lamps was distinctive, he says – and quite possibly unique to York.
One of the lamps at Clifford Street in the early 1900s
One early photo, taken in 1904 during the construction of Deangate, shows one of the lamps. Another early photo shows one of the lamps on Ouse Bridge in 1905.
By 1911, that lamp had gone – possibly removed when the city’s new tramways were installed.
Many others lamps survived across the city until the 1940s, however.
Then they seem to have disappeared.
“Did they get melted down for the war effort?” John says.
Somehow, the one on Minster Gates survived.
Goodramgate in 1940, with one of the lamps on the left
John believes it will have been an original, rather than a replica. “A replica would have been made of steel, not wrought-iron, so this one was more likely to be an original.”
If so, then it was the last of its kind. “There are none left!” he said. “That is why it is such a tragedy.”
Following the incident last Monday, council workers removed the lamp.
Lamenting the loss of the lamp post, Dr Duncan Marks of York Civic Trust said: “This destruction acts as an unfortunate reminder of the risk to heritage from jostling delivery vans in the heart of the city.
A lamp in Gillygate c 1940
“We welcome and support City of York Council in the future restitution of the lamp."
Joh Shaw clings to one last hope, meanwhile – that there may still be some of the lamps out there somewhere, perhaps lying forgotten in someone’s back yard.
He hopes the photographs today may just jog someone’s memory.
“Perhaps someone will say ‘Oh! I’ve got one of these in my garden!” he said.
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