Kirkgate at York's Castle Museum is expanded

IT’S the noises that grab you first. A horse and carriage clip-clopping down the street, causing you to jump aside just in case; a dog barking; voices coming from the open doorway of a shop; a baby coughing and crying somewhere off in the distance.

Follow the sound of the crying baby and you find yourself in a dark, dank back alley. The lighting is dim, the walls cracked and damp, patches of bare brick showing through the plaster that once covered them.

Fading, tatty advertising posters are plastered everywhere. ‘Hutchinson Brothers, The People’s Food Providers’, says one. ‘A. Pooler, Anatomical Speculatists In Bespoke Hand-Sewn Bootmaking’ says another, the lettering scarcely legible.

On a wall high up on the side of the alley hangs a pawnbroker’s sign. Turn in through one of the doors, and you find yourself in a poor worker’s home. A narrow pallet bed lies on the floor. There is a rough table with the remains of a meal and an old copy of a newspaper laid out, and a poor excuse for a fire.

This dank and miserable room is where the sound of the crying and coughing baby is coming from.

Welcome to the new-look Kirkgate. The recreated Victorian street, the Castle Museum’s jewel in the crown, has been given a £300,000 makeover. And suddenly it doesn’t seem like just a street any more. It seems like a whole, recreated city.

The main street itself, Kirkgate, is still there. But most of the shops that line it have been given a complete makeover. Every one is now a reproduction of a real shop that existed somewhere in the centre of York between 1870 and 1901.

So there is a reproduction of Leak & Thorpe, the upmarket Coney Street drapers – complete with a member of staff, and as many as 200 items.

It’s not as big as the original Leak & Thorpe – that was an emporium with a number of different departments, says Gwendolen Whitaker, the Castle Museum’s curator of history.

But the museum has made every effort to make the shop as authentic as possible, down to the French polish on the plate glass window frames that front the street.

There are a host of other new shops, too: Sessions bookshop; The Little Dust Pan ironmongers; Banks’ music shop; Britton’s upmarket Italian grocers and delicatessen; Kendrick’s toyshop and ‘fancy repository’.

Museum curators have spent months researching each of these businesses to make them as authentic as possible, delving into company archives and even interviewing former employees and descendants of the families who ran them, some of whom will be visiting the street for the first time for a sneak preview today.

The shops give a fabulous chance to show off more of the museum’s treasure-trove of items.

Impressive as the new-look main street is, however, it is the two new back alleys that really bring the revamped Kirkgate to life.

The alley with the pawnbrokers’ sign and the poor worker’s house has been dubbed Rowntree Snicket. It is designed to show the other side of York from the bright shop fronts out on the main street, says Gwendolen: the York of Seebohm Rowntree’s landmark poverty study.

Further along from the poor worker’s home is a tallow factory, then the back entrance to Ambrose’s – a grocer for poorer folk than those who would have patronised Britton’s.

You can enter Ambrose’s from the main street as a customer. But if you come down Rowntree Snicket you’ll be able to get in through the back door and the stock room, too, as though you were an employee.

Rowntree Snicket wasn’t quite complete when The Press visited – the new-look Kirkgate doesn’t officially open until Saturday. But when it is finished there will be smells as well as noises, promises Gwendolen: an authentic ‘yucky street smell’, as well as a pong from an outside privy.

The second new alley – so far unnamed – is perhaps even more intriguing. This includes a cocoa room, where Victorians would have drunk coffee and cocoa, and Rymer’s funeral directors, complete with newly made coffin.

Its location has been well chosen. The room in which it is based used, in the early days of the old York prison, to be ‘The Drop’, says Gwendolen, the place where condemned prisoners waited before being led to the gallows.

The effect of the two new alleys, with their back entrances into shops and nooks and crannies to explore, is to create a real sense of open space: a sense further enhanced when the bells of York Minster toll out, seeming to have drifted here from far across the city.

Suddenly, this wonderful part of the museum is much more than just a street of shops: it is an evocation of York as it was more than 100 years ago, warts and all.

As you come to the end of the street, there is a courtyard area strung with bunting – highly appropriate in this Jubilee year.

Except the bunting here isn’t for Queen Elizabeth. It marks the death of Queen Victoria and the accession to the throne of King Edward VII, says Gwendolen.

It is a lovely, final touch: one that adds a seal of real authenticity to a wonderful evocation of the period.

• The Castle Museum remains open all this week as usual, but the new alleys in Kirkgate are still roped off while they are being completed. They open officially at 9.30am on Saturday.