Chief Reporter Mike Laycock retires today after 38 years at The Press. In the last of a series of farewell articles, he looks at how York and its daily newspaper have changed.

 

9am, Monday, December 10, 1984. That's when it all began for me, as I walked through the front door of what was then The Yorkshire Evening Press and is now the Waterstones' store in Coney Street.

Past a row of receptionists, down a dingy corridor, up some stairs and into the nicotine-stained newsroom, filled with the clatter of typewriters and chatter of reporters and smoke from burning cigarettes.

York Press:

Further back in the building, in what is now the CityScreen cinema, the linotype machines were being prepared to print the first edition of the day, when they would fill the building with a deafening roar.

York Press:

Behind them was the River Ouse, along which barges came on a regular basis to deliver our paper for printing.

And each day, delivery vans would weave through the shoppers in the non-pedestrianised street to pick up their bundles of newspapers from the narrow lane at the side of the Press building.

York Press:

York then was quite industrial, with tens of thousands of people working at factories including Rowntrees, Terry's, the York Carriageworks, the British Sugar factory and a printworks in Boroughridge Road.

If you were driving along Holgate Road at the end of a shift at the carriageworks, you would come to a halt while hundreds of workers cycled out of the gates.

With no Monks Cross or Designer Outlet on the outskirts, or goods available on the Internet, you went to the city centre if you wanted to buy something.

York had only two cinemas, which later decreased to just one, the Odeon. There was the Theatre Royal. The University of York was relatively young and small, St John's was just a college. There were just a handful of larger, modern hotels. Tourism, boosted by the opening of the pioneering Jorvik Viking Centre with its time-travel cars, was only just beginning its steady rise to dominance in the city's economy.

Fast forward 38 years and tourism, the universities and tech businesses are dominant, the city's industry reduced by a series of factory closures to just one big player, the Nestle factory. City centre shops fight on, thanks to the millions of tourists.

Culturally, it's a rich city, with no fewer than four cinema complexes, plus the Grand Opera House and Barbican.

Meanwhile, at The Press, I'm WFH and typing this article on a laptop in my sitting room.

Colleagues work part of the time in a small office complex in Walmgate, where the business moved in 1989, and part of the time from their homes. The technology means it doesn't matter where you are.

Modern printing presses were installed in Walmgate in 1989 and used to print the paper for many years but it's now printed many miles away and driven back to York for delivery each day.

The paper's title first lost its 'Yorkshire' and then its 'Evening' over the years, ending up simply The Press. Thousands of people still buy the newspaper, but many more now read our stories online, often via social media.

But, despite all the technological changes, my job as a reporter remains, at its heart, the same: to tell people in York and North Yorkshire what is going on in their community - in the shops, pubs, restaurants, schools, universities, museums, GP surgeries and hospitals, and on the roads and the railways, and in the courts and at inquests, and in the council chamber.

It will never be safe to rely on what people are posting on social media to know what is going on: a democratic, well-informed society needs its local newspaper and website and I sincerely hope The Press will continue to keep York well informed for many decades to come.