So although it made sense at first to venture beyond the walls on this second day, I found that by far the most logical place to proceed from was this view from the building that defines the majority of my daylight hours. I’ve not yet managed to escape outside, then, but on a typical day this glimpse of the sky is the closest that I get to it for most of my working hours, so it is entirely appropriate.
This is York, or at least a partial view of it, a city that offers a never-ending collision of historical periods and one that could be pored over endlessly in a search for meaning and significance. This is something I’m not going to do on this blog, despite it representing the majority of the space outside of my walls on any given day. The city holds, I suppose, a drily academic interest for me, and provides me with a place to live and work, but largely that’s where our relationship ends. For a place of such importance during the mediaeval period it is now curiously dulled by a complete lack of any significant progress since the 19th century. Even the most extensive changes in that century were mostly in chocolate factories and proletarian housing of the most uninspired stripe, with very little work of note in the centre to relieve the sense of clerical oppressiveness that the Minster offers. Mediaeval churches abound, too, and the densely-packed streets of jettied housing and shops offer the sense of a circumscribed past of narrow horizons and superstition preserved perfectly and presented to the market as an open-air shopping centre par excellence. Shopping, proffered alongside the maintenance of an illusion of historical unity with an unselfconsciously picturesque period of history, holds no interest for me. Only the most recherche slices of York’s architecture will be worthy of discussion here.
Back to the view, though. It provides something of a potted account of what York exists as today: an agglomoration of highly-important buildings of some considerable antiquity and a panoply of more contemporary structures, quaking in their shadow, that would disgrace a business park in Luton. The church with the tower is St Martin’s, Coney Street, largely of the 15th century and, following its bombing in a Baedecker raid in April 1942, its south aisle and tower were preserved as a peace chapel, fitted out quite stylishly by George Pace and opened in April 1968. The church with the spire is All Saints North Street, primarily of the 14th century and containing some of the most important medieaval stained glass of its date anywhere in Europe, not least the very affecting Pricke of Conscience window. The be-gabled building with terracotta detailing is the York Equitable Industrial Society building of 1899, with showrooms and shops at street level and offices above. The terracotta-coloured tiles in the immediate foreground form part of a 21st century re-cladding scheme on a concrete-framed car park-cum-retail block immediately adjacent to my workplace. They are not the bit of the view I value the most.
There may – almost certainly will – be more on this. It does, as I’ve said, represent the greater part of my daily visual nourishment.
