York's Hidden history: Festival Concert Rooms now a car park

Few readers might know that 200 years ago on that very same car park stood York's much-loved Festival Concert Rooms which once hosted musical and literary events - including a reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

The Festival Concert Rooms are a long lost building of York - but we are shining the light on their story today.

The rooms were built in 1825 to designs by P Atkinson Junior and R H Sharp, with room for an audience of 2,000 and an orchestra of 144.

They were built because it was deemed that the Assembly Rooms in Blake Street, dating from 1725, were too small to host musical concerts.

View from York Minster 1890 - to the left you can see the large room of the concert rooms, just behind the Assembly Rooms

York's Explore archive has a magnificent plan of the Festival Concert Rooms showing their layout, including stairs to the upper galleries, which had fixed seating, and a central area with moveable benches.

Next to the orchestra area was an entrance for musicians, which backed on to Museum Street, (then called Finkle Street).

Although the Festival Concert Rooms were built at the back of the Assembly Rooms, they slotted in among existing buildings in Finkle Street.

However, the rooms were accessed via a connecting door from the Assembly Rooms' ballroom, and it was only later, when the construction of Lendal Bridge required the widening of the road, that a new frontage was created on what would become Museum Street.

Another of our photos today shows a view from York Minster towards Blake Street in 1890.

Look to the left - can you spot the prominent roof of the large building just behind the Assembly Rooms? That is the Festival Concert Rooms, later called the Museum Chambers and Museum Rooms. The car park lies there today.

Car park lies there today on the site of the former Festival Concert Rooms

The Festival Concert Rooms were used for a wide variety of concerts and speakers as well as by private individuals and a range of local groups and societies.

The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray lectured there in 1857 and the following year Charles Dickens read from A Christmas Carol, during the first of his four visits to York.

Other performances of note include Mlle Carlotta Patti in 1873 and Kubelik the violinist in 1910.

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The rooms gained a cinematograph licence from 1910 to 1915 and showed films. In 1929 the upper stories of the rooms were converted into offices and the lower concert hall became a saleroom.

In 1940, the rooms were bought for £14,000 by Alderman Cooper and a year later sold at the same price to the corporation.

Part of the building was now known as Museum Chambers and rooms were leased to a variety of tenants.

Areas of the building were still used as offices and a storeroom in 1958 when the concert hall itself was converted into an exhibition hall and was once again connected with the Assembly Rooms

The rooms were finally demolished in 1974.