York’s sharp social split

Between them, they show two sides of the city’s past – the genteel, and the poverty-stricken.

The genteel first. William Hayes was a noted photographer of his day, and his picture of Micklegate – taken presumably some time before 1909, because it shows a horse-drawn tram of the kind which stopped operating that year – has a studied, leisurely elegance to it.

The women promenading on the street are well dressed, and this was obviously a conspicuously well-off quarter of York.

Micklegate House, seen second from the right, was the town house of the Bouchier family, who also owned Beningbrough Hall. More than 250 years before this photo was taken, one of the Bouchiers was a signatory on the death warrant of King Charles I.

Our second photograph today, also taken by William Hayes, in about 1905, shows another scene of genteel York. This time it is a busy Blake Street, with two horse-drawn light carriages going up and down the road in opposite directions in bright sunlight. It is a prosperous scene of solid, middle-class respectability.

Contrast these with our other photos of York, taken in the early 1930s before a substantial programme of slum clearance.

One shows Albert Street, taken from George Street in about 1933. It’s a drab, dour street with not a leaf of green, but the people in the photo – the mothers standing in doorways with infants propped on their cocked hips, and the older children standing posed with their arms around each other in the centre of the street – seem cheerful enough.

Next up is Hope Street, photographed at about the same time, with a number of people, most with their backs to the camera, crowding into the street.

These houses, and the ones in the earlier photo of Albert Street, were demolished between 1937 and 1940.

Finally, to give an indication of just how crowded the poorer quarters of York were, we have a view – taken from a high perspective – of Layerthorpe in the 1930s.

The scene is dominated by the gasometer in the foreground. To the right, next to the River Foss, is Foss Bank (where Sainsbury’s now is), while the large road leading off into the distance at the top of the picture is Peasholme Green.

Most of the buildings in the photo were demolished in the late 1930s, and their places taken by small industry and commercial properties.

• Photographs reproduced courtesy of the City of York Council’s Imagine York website – imagineyork.co.uk – and the Ryedale Folk Museum’s Hayes Collection

Layerthorpe in the 1930s, with the gasometer in the foreground, the River Foss to the right