York has some of the most attractive historic buildings and streetscapes in the country.

Robust planning controls protect them. But should we still value and keep the front – the façade – of a historic building when the rest of it is no longer of use or in a poor condition?

And what can we learn from examples of reuse of façades in York?

The preservation of a historic façade as part of a new building is known by conservationists as ‘facadism’. It can be a controversial approach.

On one hand it ensures the survival of historic fabric. The façade of the Banana Warehouse on Piccadilly - a former warehouse of 1925, when the River Foss was York’s industrial working river, and bananas a valued imperial product - is currently clamped upright since the rest of the building has been demolished.

It is set to be preserved as an entrance to a restaurant, part of a 160-bed newbuild hotel.

For those who oppose it, facadism is seen as a skin-deep appreciation of heritage, a tactic favoured by some developers to fob off campaigners, preserving a small part of a building to justify demolition and redevelopment of the rest.

When clagged onto a new boxy hotel rising to five-storeys, the Banana Warehouse façade will certainly offer a surprising and striking historic front to draw the eye.

It might prompt us to consider how the city has changed over a century, and remind us of York’s transforming commercial prowess - in place of the international trade of goods, the city now benefits from hotel provision to serve the city’s tourism industry.

Two other examples of types of facadism near Piccadilly offer contrasting fortunes in preserving historic façades.

New luxury apartments in the footprint of the old Fire Station on Clifford’s Street retained a gable end of a former Wesleyan Chapel. Dating from 1854 and in multicoloured brickwork, the gable end has certainly been smartened, even if the rest of the building was demolished.

But whereas the chapel had been converted, bizarrely, into a fire station in 1934, the Victorian chapel wall is rather lost in the new development; only a connoisseur’s eye will read it as a surviving relic of a Victorian non-conformist chapel.

Facadism is not always the result of design choice, however.

The ravages of war, flood and fire have resulted in the loss of historic buildings that leave only an external shell. York’s greatest example of this is Clifford’s Tower. A Norman castle keep that was rebuilt in stone in the mid-thirteenth century, the entire inner structure, including roof, was destroyed in 1684 by an accidental explosion.

A strikingly modern, free-standing structure with roof deck was inserted in 2022 as part of English Heritage’s visitor experience improvements. It is a great success – having recently won three RIBA Yorkshire architectural awards as well as York Design Awards; the new cleverly contrasts with and yet compliments the historic.

There’s something interesting about why the reuse of some façades is more acceptable than others.

Aren’t we more sympathetic and passionate to keep façades of buildings that have been lost due to accidents or neglect? It’s as if the ‘cause of death’ of a building is more natural this way than when a developer chooses to retain a façade as part of a massive new hotel or luxury flats.

How appropriate the reuse of a façade or exterior shell is is also important. Clifford’s Tower is now a tourist attraction, not a military structure, but its commanding views of the city and beyond from its ramparts offers continuity across the centuries.

By comparison, there’s no real connection between a hotel and a warehouse, nor Methodist chapel and apartments.

If there are lessons to be learnt on appropriate York facadism, there’s hope for a recent proposal to retain important railway heritage.

Network Rail is proposing to keep and reuse elevations of a derelict late-Victorian storage building at the former Holgate Carriage Works (although, sadly, they are choosing not to use the same facadism approach for a Victorian canteen building nearby, instead seeking full demolition, despite it being one of the few historic railway welfare buildings of its age remaining in the country).

The facades of the Victorian storage building are to be reused for a similar ancillary use, and to once more serve the Britain’s railway network. It offers strong continuity of use across time and preserves important historic and architecturally interesting elevations in the process.

Perhaps facadism has uses, after all?

  • Dr Duncan Marks is York Civic Trust's planning and heritage manager