You can't park that here

"The visitor was so very, very enthusiastic about York," it began. "He had been, he said, all over the world and had never found a city to compare with it.

"For fully a minute there was praise - then came the rub. 'But why does the city spoil itself by chasing after car drivers for sixpence whenever they put their car in a recognised park?

"'I had an exasperating experience. I left my car near your wonderful Castle Museum and a man rushed up to me for sixpence.

"'Then I went to the Minster and there was another sixpence to pay for parking the car. Later I came back into town and decided to leave my car in the Market Place. Surely, I thought, there will be nothing to pay here.

"'But up came an attendant to collect again. The last straw came when I parked the car near Clifford's Tower while I went to a nearby garage.

"'When I came out there was a man waiting to extract another sixpence.

"'I said: 'If you come near me, I'll charge you with begging'."

The exasperated tourist finished by saying he had successfully campaigned against car parking fees in Weymouth, and he was writing to the Automobile Association and the Chief Constable to see what could be done in York.

We can take it that the man failed to repeat his Weymouth success. Road traffic and parking charges became a York bugbear almost as soon as cars first arrived - and they still are.

The above report surfaced in Mr Nobody's Diary, published in the Evening Press on July 7, 1954 - 50 years ago on Wednesday.

Today the issue burns just as strongly. Evening car park charges and new parking restrictions have caused such anger that the Evening Press launched its Stop The Highway Robbery campaign last week.

We have to go back 100 years to find a time when cars were not causing trouble in York.

In the early years of the last century they were still a novelty. The Grout steam car, doing 20 miles per gallon of fuel, and one or two miles per gallon of water, arrived in 1901.

Most ordinary folk only experienced motor power via the charabanc trip to the seaside.

But by the 1930s, the car had begun to make an impact. Roads were being resurfaced and widened to cope. Several smaller railway stations, including the one at Haxby, were closed in response to the increasing popularity of the motor car.

Petrol rationing during the war slowed this trend. But the industry around the car continued to grow in the late Forties: City Garage opened in Blake Street; Austin dealer the Castle Garage was established opposite the Castle Museum; and Hillman and Humber specialist Lister & Edmond traded on The Mount.

Suddenly you could hardly move in York for fear of stepping in front of a car. Two way traffic squeezed along Coney Street, Parliament Street and Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate.

Possibly the first serious study of the impact of city traffic came in A Plan For The City Of York, published in 1948. It called for slum clearances to make way for the construction of an inner ring road.

"The clearance of these areas and the development of derelict land round the old Hull Road Brickworks provide most of the land necessary to lay out this new ring road," the report stated.

"The intention is to ring the old city at an average distance of 250 yards outside the walls with a dual carriageway."

More changes were put forward in the Fifties, as the congestion increased markedly.

A 1956 plan envisaged a new one-way system. Buses would run along High Ousegate, from Spurriergate corner to Parliament Street. Traffic from St Leonard's would be prevented from entering Museum Street but would continue through Blake Street.

One-way systems would be introduced in Micklegate, Goodramgate and Deangate and Blake Street.

Meanwhile, Castle Mills Bridge and Lord Mayor's Walk were both widened to accommodate more traffic. The Old George Hotel was sacrificed to allow Stonebow to open in 1955.

It was one thing to provide roads for all these new cars to travel around. But what happened when they wanted to stop?

Parking was becoming a real problem. New regulations introduced in 1959 provided for "no waiting" in certain city centre streets.

Waiting times in St Sampson's Square and Parliament Street were cut to 90 minutes. Motorists found themselves searching for spaces at spots dotted around the centre.

Everywhere you parked you had to cough up sixpence, as the visitor who began this article discovered.

In the Sixties, the fast-changing face of York led to Lord Esher being commissioned to consider the city's future development and conservation. His 250-page report worried about the state of the historic fabric of York, but noted that "money spent on buildings will be wasted unless the traffic problem is progressively solved at the same time".

Lord Esher advocated restrictions on traffic in various parts of the city, and deplored the "planning blight and indecision" that left Clifford's Tower "forlornly trapped between the traffic of Tower Street and the parked cars and vacant sites flanking the Foss".

Yet he also wished to encourage more people into the centre, both as residents and visitors. This would clearly add to York's parking woes.

To cope, he envisaged the construction of four multi-storey car parks, in Skeldergate, Merchantgate, Gillygate and Monkgate.

Fortunately, this part of the good peer's vision was never implemented. Instead, the Seventies became the first decade when York reclaimed some of its ancient streets from the car. Stonegate became the city's first footstreet, and car parking was banned from Parliament Street and St Sampson's Square in 1974.

Meanwhile, new technology was brought in to the remaining car parks, as drivers learned how to Pay & Display for the first time.

Some things never change, however. Thirty years ago, the council approved an increase in car park fees, to 10p for the first two hours and 10p an hour after that.

It prompted a reader's letter: "The amount of the proposed increases are nothing short of highway robbery. In fact the council make the past exploits of Dick Turpin almost saintly."

Updated: 11:13 Monday, July 05, 2004