Bid to create state-of-the-art archive York’s central library

GO upstairs at York’s central library, look across the balconied atrium and you’ll see, tucked away in the right hand corner beyond a row of computers, a mysterious door.

It’s a beautifully proportioned door that must, surely, lead to something interesting.

Richard Taylor, City of York Council’s archives development manager, often gets asked what’s behind it. His answer, he admits, comes as a disappointment. It’s a broom cupboard.

Look out of the windows next to the door and you’ll see why. Architect Walter Brierley’s original intention, in the 1920s, was for this building to be two storeys high But that vision was never fulfilled. The entire east wing, which backs on to council offices, is just a single storey. The door leads out only on to roofs.

Not for much longer, if Richard has his way.

He and his team are busy finalising a bid for about £1 million of Heritage Lottery money. If successful, it will be used to revamp the upper floor of the library building as a purpose-designed home for the city’s archives and local history collection – with an entire new floor on that east wing to house the archives themselves.

Since the library reopened in May following a £540,000 revamp, Richard and his archives and local history team have been based here, upstairs in the local history library.

It makes sense, he says, for people to be able to be able to use the archives and the local history collection in the same place. Except that the archives themselves – all 6,000 boxes of them – are still stored in a wing of the city art gallery.

That means that when someone comes to the library to ask to see original archive material an archivist has to go across to the art gallery to fetch them. Hence the lottery bid.

Bringing the archives across here would mean for the first time York had a single local history and archives centre, with all the material under one roof. This one building, Richard says, could be the gateway to York’s history. “It’s the ideal location, right in the centre of the city, with good public transport routes, next to the museum.”

The lottery bid he’s preparing would cover much of the cost of building a new storey here to house the archives. But the £1.4 million project would involve much more.

Walk into the local history library and, if the bid is successful, the area to your left will one day be sectioned off with a see-through glass partition.

This will be the area where, under supervision, you can come to read original archive material, Richard said.

It is important to him that it be a glass partition only – he wants people to realise the archives are there for everyone, and that anyone is allowed to look at them, whether it’s a medieval record of the visit of King Henry VIII, or photographs or records belonging to the York & District Lambretta Club.

“I want everybody coming in here to be able to see that you can do this,” the 48-year-old said. “That you can come and ask to get your hands on original material. You don’t need a pass, you don’t have to knock three times, mysteriously, on the door.”

At the moment, he said, a comparatively small group of people use the archives – historians, local historians, genealogists and the like. But they belong to us all.

They tell the story of the city we live in, and how we connect to it. That’s as true for someone living in a council house in Tang Hall as it is for someone in a posh house by the river.

The local history library itself will be improved if the lottery bid is successful, with more reading tables beside the windows, and central bookcases to display more of the stock.

And the final piece in the jigsaw will be to open up the stack room at the far end of the library.

There are two more mysterious doors there, Richard said. As a York schoolboy, he remembers looking at those doors and wondering what lay beyond. “It was always this mysterious room that staff would disappear into.”

What lies beyond are the stacks for the reference library: tight-packed shelves of books in a dark, musty room with blinds across the window.

Except that it isn’t really a dark, musty room: it only seems that way, because it is so crowded, and because of the shuttered windows.

Richard’s plan is to open it up, move the reference books, take the blinds down from the windows so you can look out over the Multangular Tower, and make this into a family history room. Volunteer guides, family history groups, even the York Oral History Society, could all have a presence here, he said. And the public could come here to research local history through the extension collection of books, online, and on microfiche.

All this depends on that lottery bid, of course. The plan is for the initial bid to be lodged early next year.

If Richard’s team get past that hurdle, they will then lodge a more detailed bid by the end of next year.

All being well, he says, they could be toasting the success of the application by Spring 2012 – just in time for the 800th anniversary of York getting its Lord Mayor. That would be something to celebrate.

What is contained in York archives?

The city’s medieval archives are world-famous – but they make up only a small part of the York archives.

Other material includes:

• Maps and plans showing the development of York from the 17th century to the modern day. • Newspapers, the earliest being the York Courant of 1728.

• York directories dating from 1781 up to 1975.

• Poll books and electoral registers.

• Copies of parish registers.

• The Index of Births, Marriages & Deaths from 1837 to 2001 available on microfilm.

• The “Imagine York” website imagineyork.co.uk holds 5,500 digitised photographic images.

• York Civic Archives: the official records of how York’s people have governed their city. These begin with the Henry II charter in 1155.

From 1476 to the present day there is a record of every single meeting of the city council.

• The archives of a huge variety of local groups such as The York Musical Society, York Society for the Prosecution of Felons, York Fatstock Society, York Conservative Club and the York & District Lambretta Club.

A wealth of information at your fingertips

PEOPLE shouldn’t let themselves be intimidated at the thought of using York’s archives, Richard Taylor says.

You don’t need to jump straight in at the deep end and ask to see a 500-year-old medieval manuscript.

Often the starting point, if you simply want to find out a little about the history of your street or suburb, is the local history collection rather than the archives themselves.

That collection is hugely impressive, embracing maps, plans, newspapers, electoral registers, local magazines and journals.

The Local History Library, in fact, contains more than 20,000 published books and titles – and you can often find much of what you need here.

But where should a beginner start? If you’re not sure, Richard says, the first thing is to ask staff for help. That’s what they’re there for.

So I do. I set him a challenge: to find out something about the street – Alma Grove – in which I live.

It’s a small horseshoe-shaped street off Fulford Road.

Richard begins by asking me how old the street is. About 100 years, I tell him. He does a quick search in the local newspaper index for the 1905-1915 period. It turns up nothing about when the street was built.

Next he turns to the general local history card catalogue. Again, nothing specifically for Alma Grove, though there are plenty of histories of Fishergate.

So he tries the electoral registers. There’s no Alma Grove in 1904/5, only Alma Terrace.

Fast forward a few years, and there’s still no Alma Grove in 1913/14. But then suddenly it appears in 1914/15, with several people for the first time listed as living there.

It’s clear it is a new street, because only a few houses are occupied. Mine, it turns out, was one of them. Richard asks me which number I live at. His finger trawls down the list, stops, and taps the paper. “Herbert Jennings,” he says.

It gives me a peculiar thrill. I now know the name of the very first person ever to live in my house. If I wanted, Richard says, I could take this name and search through the newspaper archives to see if Mr Jennings ever did anything that got him into the news.

I decide to save that for the future, and instead ask to find out what was here before my street was built.

Richard enlists the aid of Victoria Hoyle, the recently-appointed civic archivist, to go through old maps. There is a beautiful, large-scale, hand-drawn one from 1891 which shows that where Alma Grove is now, there used to be a large, walled kitchen garden, known as Alma Gardens.

There are glasshouses marked, and drawings of small trees which suggest there may have been an orchard.

Closer examination suggests it was the kitchen garden to Brier House, a large villa fronting on to Fulford Road. It’s back to the books for Richard, this time the Trade Directories for the turn of the 19th century.

In 1893, it turns out, Brier House was owned by a Miss AW Cooper.

It prompts Richard into a flight of what he admits is speculation – but fascinating speculation.

“I like to think she might have been an elderly Victorian spinster, living in a large, perhaps slightly dilapidated villa,” he said.

“She dies, her executors decide to keep the house and sell off the garden to a local builder, and he puts in a horseshoe of houses.”

That may well have been exactly what happened. Not bad for half an hour’s research.

A map of the ‘teardrop’ railway works area in York dating from 1852.