Leeds

 Leeds City Hall

We are on a short visit to Leeds to see our nephew who has just started at Uni there. I have taken the liberty of merging a little bit of last night’s walk with today’s.

We set out from our hotel, Quebecs in er Quebec St. It is a very good hotel in a lovely building which was once the Leeds and County Liberal Club. The terracotta decoration on the facade usually suggests a date in the 1880s and it turns out that it was built in 1891.

At the end we turned right and then second left in St Paul’s St where I admired the Moorish arches and floral decorations of this house.

Our immediate goal was Park Square and as we turned right to go into it we were astonished by more Moorish architecture on the rear corner of St Paul's House. It was built as a warehouse and cloth-cutting works in 1878.

It is imposing from the front with extensive terracotta decoration around the windows and what seems to be two minarets on the corners.

We left the lovely square, noting an astonishing number of rubbish bins which we took as an expression of civic pride. Just around the corner into the Headrow we passed Oxford Place (Methodist) Chapel. It was built in 1835 and extended in 1895 when the adjoining Chambers, with its splendid tower, were added to be let as offices and provide a source of income.

Just beyond the chapel we came to the celebrated Town Hall by Cuthbert Broderick between 1853 and 1858 (see picture at the head of this post).  The Christmas decorations and banners don’t do very much for the façade.   

We turned left up Calverley Street passing the German Market and then the Civic Hall. This is a fairly undistinguished 1930s building, but it is lifted by the projecting clock supported on gilded struts and by the golden owl on the top of the spire. This is another picture from last night with the sun right on the clock.

We headed north to meet Benji and have an illuminating walk around the places where he lives, works and plays. As we were crossing the motorway bridge, there was a fantastic modern tower on the right.

 I took just one picture of the University campus as a memento: the 19th century Great Hall of the University.

We headed back to where Calverley Road meets the Headrow and went in to see the City Art Gallery. This was very good with some excellent 19^th and 20^th century pictures. We especially enjoyed four by Atkinson Grimshaw. To our great surprise and delight, there was a very good display of watercolours and sketches by the East Anglian painter John Sell Cotman, who was once seen as a better water colourist than Turner, and is still seen as pretty good.

Within the building was the delightful Tiled Hall café …

… and the reference library in a room with great terracotta tiled arches.

Now further along the Headrow, a road seemingly lined with shopping centres, to turn right into Lands Lane and enter the wonderful zone of arcades. The first one we saw, Thornton’s Arcade, was one of our favourites. It was apparently the first of eight arcades built by about 1900. It was built by local architect George Smith in 1877-8, for Charles Thornton.

We continued down Lands Lane and turned into Queens Arcade which brought us out into Briggate. We then went into the impressive County Arcade of 1901.

At the end we turned into Duncan St which brought us to the Corn Exchange. It was designed by Cuthbert Broderick (he of the City Hall) and completed in 1862. It is an oval structure, not tremendously exciting from the outside …

… but airy and spacious on the inside. A bit of a tardis therefore. After a renovation on 1980s it now contains an array of small shops. I found it reminiscent of Covent Garden market.

We then went along Call Lane and right into Kirkgate to see Leeds Minster. It is a 19th century building constructed after its predecessor was destroyed in a fire.

Now we headed towards Brewery Wharf, crossing the River Aire on the way.

Brewery Wharf was a bit disappointing to be honest – all modern buildings, not the renovated old brewery we imagined. It would have been possible to embark on an exploration of the river bank and the tow path of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal further along, but we were now cold and a bit tired so we headed back across the river. We turned left into The Calls and then Call Lane, right into Lower Briggate and left into Boar Lane. This brought us to City Square just in front of the station where we enjoyed a pleasant late lunch in a restaurant called, rather ridiculously, The restaurant, in the former central Post Office.

Conditions: bright at first, becoming progressively greyer.

Distance: about 4 miles.

Rating: four stars. Really interesting and enjoyable, but nothing that was absolutely great.

York: the City walls

Bootham Bar

York first had walls under the Romans in about 71AD, but the ones you can see today mainly date from the 12th to 14th centuries and were reinforced during the Civil War. By the 19th century they were felt by some to be an encumbrance and there were calls for their demolition. This produced a campaign for their survival and the outcome was that a programme of restoration coupled with some new gaps being introduced to allow easier access for traffic.

We started our walk at Bootham Bar, with the Minster towers in the background. Just as York's streets are confusingly often called Gate, its gates are know as Bars. Bootham Bar is one of the four main gates and the lowest storey dates from the 11th century, the upper storeys from the 15th.

You climb the stairs visible in the photo and walk through the tower to join an initially very narrow walkway. We had to wait while a tour party came the other way - what must it be like in high summer? This section of wall was built in Victorian times on the original ramparts.

At the north corner the wall turns sharply right and there are clearer views of the Minster, with the back of the Treasurer's House in Minster Yard in the foreground. The pointed roof belongs to the wonderful Chapter House which we visited yesterday.

In the next section, alongside Lord Mayor's Walk, there is a nice view across to the Tudor-style buildings of the York St John University. Soon after, you reach the second main gate, Monk Bar, the tallest and strongest of the four. It was built in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Not long after this there is an interruption to the walls and you have to descend to ground level at a busy road junction - suddenly you could be anywhere. This area was once a large marshy lake, which prevented wall building and attack alike. There is however a wonderful industrial survival, the massive chimney known as the Destructor, which belonged to an incinerator for the city's rubbish.

The path follows the River Foss for a while and the walls resume at the unprepossessing Red Tower. This was built round 1500 and is the only one built of brick. The land level was raised here in Victorian times, making the tower seem more squat than it originally was.

This section looks over rather suburban housing, but soon leads to a medieval gem Walmgate Bar. The view from inside the walls is very surprising with a rather lovely loggia-like Elizabethan extension, now housing a cafe.

Outside, there is the one remaining barbican (the other Bars had theirs removed in the early 19th century).

At Fishergate Bar, a little further on there is a handsome plaque to commemorate repairs completed in 1487.

From the next section of wall we spotted this old shop front with art nouveau style lettering.

The wall ends briefly at Fishergate Postern Tower, which was built to defend a narrow pedestrian entrance.  We were now near the site of York Castle and we had a fine view of Clifford's Tower, the ruined keep of the original Norman castle, which we saw yesterday from the town side. It seemed to be very popular.

We crossed the River Ouse and rejoined the walls, to soon reach a long straight section, with grassy banks on both sides. These are planted with daffodils which apparently make a famous display in early spring. They were just beginning to come into flower.

This section ends with the imposing Micklegate Bar, once the main entrance to the city: it guards the main road south.

Soon after Micklegate Bar the walls turn right towards the River Ouse and the Minster, with modern offices and a large hotel on the inside and the Railway Station and another large hotel on the outside.

Walking across Lendal Bridge, we were struck by the very decorative lamps.

The final section goes through Museum Gardens, with the best surviving stretch of Roman wall and a Roman tower.

Conditions: bright at first, becoming progressively more grey.

Distance: 2 miles.

Rating: five stars.

More information: Simin Mattam - A walking guide to York's City Walls. (Very comprehensive and informative, but I didn't like the way it was organised.)

York: inside the City

York Minster

In York for the weekend and we start with this walk based on one around hidden York from the AA website. The walk starts in Museum Gardens and our first sight was the ruins of St Leonard's Hospital. Erected on the site of the former hospital severely damaged in a fire in 1137, it was said to be the largest in the North of England. In the manner of medieval hospitals it would have cared for travelers and the sick, poor, elderly and disabled.

On the other side of the Gardens are the ruins of St Mary's Abbey: a Benedictine abbey founded 1088 and once the richest in the north of England, it was destroyed at the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539.

We then walked up Museum St towards the Minster, noting on the right the rather wonderful York Dispensary building of 1889, now offices.

We admired the west front of the Minster, especially the tracery in the great window (see post at the head of this post) and went in to be amazed by its sheer size. It is allegedly the largest gothic cathedral in northern Europe. The nave roof is certainly inspiring, and although built over two centuries in different styles of gothic architecture, the overall effect is remarkably harmonious.

Perhaps the most remarkable part was the Chapter House, along a passageway from the corner of the north transept. It was built between the 1260s and 1280s and its magnificent, vaulted ceiling is supported by timbers in the roof, instead of by a central column as was normal - and can be seen in places such as Lichfield.

The Minster also has an Astronomical Clock dating from the 1940s - who knew that such a thing had be made so recently. I think of this as a truly medieval creation as our most recent encounter, in Lund in Sweden (dating from 1380), would attest.

Outside again, we headed north towards the Minster Library and couldn't get the whole length of the Minster into a single shot. The Chapter House is the building on the left with the pointed roof.

Now our route took us along Chapter House St, Ogleforth (the first of many weird and wonderful street names) and Goodramgate into Bedern, a modern housing development which yet contained the lovely red brick Bedern Hall, the 14th century refectory of the Vicars Choral of York Minster.

Some small streets took us to St Saviourgate at the end of which is the extraordinarily named Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate, York's shortest and most famous street.

The plaque says that it derives from it derives from the phrase Whitnourwhatnourgate meaning "What a street!"- which sounds like nonsense to me. Wikipedia says that "most modern sources translate the phrase as 'Neither one thing nor the other'", which doesn't get us much further.

The route continues past the half-timbered Herbert House (1620) down an alleyway to reach Fossgate.

You are confronted by this extraordinary building, which turns out to once have been the Electric Theatre, York's first cinema, built in 1911.

Fossgate leads down to a bridge over the River Foss, where there was recent flooding. Some shops and restaurants, sadly, are still closed. Crossing the river and turning right and right again you come to Merchant Adventurers' Hall. This was originally a guild hall built in 1357. Its undercroft housed an almshouse for the poor of the city. The chapel was added later.

Following the bank of the Foss, we came next to the wonderful Clifford's Tower, this is all that remains of the Norman keep of York castle.

Nearby is the handsome 18th century building which began life as the Debtors' Prison and is now part of the York Castle Museum. Pevsner said that "this building is, next after the Minster, the most monumental of York". The tower has an unusual clock, with only one hand, installed in 1716 by  a York clockmaker, John Terry.

We departed from the AA route here as it was getting too dark to see, passing the celebrated Fairfax House and the less well-known, but more imposing, Castlegate House (below), both by the great local architect John Carr of York.

Castlegate and Spurriergate led us back to our hotel in Coney St where we could not fail to admire this wonderful clock outside the church of St Martin-le-Grand. It is known as the Little Admiral and dates originally from 1779.

One final thought: you can't help but notice than any amount of streets in York are called "-gate", which seems at bit puzzling. It turns out that this a corruption of the Norse word "gata" which in fact means street.

Conditions: pretty grey.

Distance: maybe three miles.

Rating: five stars. The Minster is magnificent and there is just so much to see.