Part Three – The Suburbs

  Two types of industry came to prominence in York during the nineteenth century.  One was the railway carriage works.  This had a kind of logic.  The city has always benefited from transport of one kind or another.  It lies on the confluence of the Foss and the Ouse, the latter river joining the Hull to form the Humber Estuary on the east coast.  From Roman times to the present day, York has been a vital link in various manifestations of the London – Edinburgh road.  We have thrived on people passing through and it's only fitting that we helped build the means for them to pass through as quickly as possible.  The other principle nineteenth century industry was chocolate.  Today the carriage works are, sadly, closed.  But chocolate factories is still mighty.

 This fact always gives me the same mixture of pride and embarrassment as the Minster's status as the highest building in town.  Chocolate factories.  Chocolate factories, for God's…. A more recent addition has been the sugar beet works on the north-west fringes.  Sheffield had the blast and sparks of the steel mills.  Bradford was founded on the no-nonsense assembly of textiles.  Collieries in Newcastle, shipbuilding in Glasgow… and in York we knock off a product which makes lives a little more pleasant and a little less healthy.

 Rowntrees stands in the north, Terry’s in the south, flanking the city like mighty sentinels and towering over all their neighbours.  Both factories are products of the late nineteenth century and look it.  Belonging to an era when aesthetic sensibilities in commercial buildings were slowly giving way to pragmatic functionality, they are well designed but chiefly impressive for their bulk.  Rowntrees is essentially just a huge brick with layers of windows cut into it.  The only beauty comes from the spectacular pink blooms of the cherry trees in front.  The factory is also less imposing, being surrounded by the houses and sub-streets of Haxby Road.  The most common views are of the factory looming unexpectedly over rooftops, and its presence is chiefly its regular emissions of lovely, vaguely nauseating sweet smells.  Terry’s is slightly more ornate, boasting a fine clock tower.  Its location is also more impressive.  Unlike Rowntrees it is on the very edge of the city, close to the racecourse.  It also stands on high ground – or the closest York gets to high ground – and strides like an awesome citadel impervious to all enemies.  If the Minster is king of one half of the city, Terry’s is almost as dominant on the other side of the Ouse.  Unfortunately, recent events have shown its invincibility to be something of an illusion.

 Rowntrees, apparently, sort of has its origins in a lady called Mary Tuke opening a shop in Walmgate.  But its true history began when Joseph Rowntree inherited the expanding cocoa works from his brother in 1883.  Joseph Rowntree developed and built up the Haxby Road site and turned the company into a leading player of its day.  For different reasons, he is also one of the most remarkable figures the city has ever produced.  No other rich businessman, for example, appears prominently in Sociology courses – at least, outside the 'Know Thine Enemies' sections featuring Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch.  He achieved this feat by carrying out a pioneering social survey, one of the first which tried to objectively study poverty levels.  Having observed said levels and become horrified by them, he tried to lower them a bit.  For Rowntree was a devout Quaker, one of those rare Christian movements which believes in helping one's fellow man in this life as well as the next.  He gave his workers free education and healthcare.  He built them the Yearsley Baths and later donated it to the city.  He developed the entirely bizarre model village New Earswick, which we shall visit presently, in 1904.  He also built more practical housing around the factory for his workforce.  Walk down Hambleton Terrace or Vyner Street today and the houses seem a little grim; dark, crowded terraces opening directly onto the street.  But it is worth noting that when the slums were cleared from the centre of town, these districts were deemed habitable enough to remain.  After his death the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was established to continue his work.  Today it spends £7 million a year combating what he called "the underlying causes of weakness or evil."

 In 2004 Terry’s parent company Suchard announced its closure.  Suchard isn't in any financial difficulties, you understand, but they decided they could get even richer using underpaid workers in other countries rather than ones paid fairly in this.  The imposing factory is currently empty and in limbo.  Most likely it will remain but be carved up internally into the usual 'executive flats'.  I'm not sure who will be able to live in them, given the current state of York's economy.  The carriage works are gone, the sugar factory is about to follow, Norwich Union is shrinking, GNER are on the brink.  And Rowntrees are on the brink too.  They were swallowed up by another Swiss company after a bitter struggle in 1988.  Namely Nestle, chiefly associated with dumping tons of piss-poor condensed milk on the Third World to the detriment of both mothers and children.  Now there's assorted calls for the boycott of KitKats and the like.  This is, of course, not a tragedy to rival Beirut or Baghdad.  But it's still a sad fate for a factory founded by a man who spent so much effort helping other people.

 (to be finished)

 I’ve already recommended walking out to Heworth to gape at the impossible reach of the Minster.  It’s also recommended for its own sake.  The industrial mess of Layerthorpe is left behind once you cross the cycle track.  You do so on a bridge which was once daubed with the message 'Ax (sic) The Poll Tax.'  This command has now been painted over but lasted for over a decade after the government did indeed ax the thing.  We are now in East Parade, a road of shabby, underplayed gentility.  On the right, just before a crown green bowling park, is a little row of slightly dilapidated but still attractive old houses with a nice little line of decorative tiles.  To the left is a truly bizarre sight.  A tall pale yellow structure, from one side it looks like a fairly normal house, if a little tall.  But a wing on the other side bulges out in a semi-circle wider than the rest of the house. The protruding windows also contain as much blue plywood as they do glass and, mysteriously, the back garden is raised up about twenty feet on stilts.  It looks like an imitation of an archaic building but it's hard to figure out precisely what.  Toll booth?  Lightkeeper's house?  Heaven only knows.  Next door stands the old Londons shop, whose sign still declares that it sells tobacco, newspapers and 'Fancy Goods.'  And the convenience store on East Parade has a half-timbered upper story.  Only a replica, probably, but old enough not to look hideous and instead to look odd.

 Turn at the huge Heworth Parish Church, head down Heworth Road and then turn left onto Heworth Green.  (I think we can conclude that we’ve arrived in Heworth now).  The left hand side of the road is full of imposing late nineteenth century town houses, three stories high with substantial attics and cellars.  A schoolmate of mine grew up in one – his father was a GP, naturally – and the space inside is not so much impressive as absurd.  Without the servants they were also intended to hold, the houses are just too large to hold a single family.  Most don't now, of course, and have been turned into pubs, boarding houses or tenement blocks.  I lived in one of the latter for a while, first in a bedsit and then in a quixotic converted garage at the back.  The landlord, an enterprising chap, had also turned the garden once standing between the house and my garage into a series of smaller residences with plastic roofs.  One day the council found out about these.  The next day the councillors were in the Press declaring the area to be 'York's Shanty Town.'  Worried that my dwelling was also included, I asked Dave Merritt, then a Labour councillor and a work colleague of mine, about it.  He hadn't heard of the converted garage.  So I looked in the records office.  There was no planning permission connected to my home.  In fact, the building didn't even seem to officially exist.  I hurriedly let the matter drop, concluding that the council inspectors hadn't actually walked to the bottom of the garden.  When I left about six months later, they still hadn't bothered doing so.

 Those living in the 'shanty town' – who weren't desperate asylum seekers, just people on a low income – seemed perfectly happy there.  But then that wasn't the point of the episode.  It was to get Dave Merritt's face in the paper smirking below a catchy soundbite.  The York Labour group probably needed some positive news at the time.  An alarming amount of scandals were already starting to build around the private life of their leader, Rod Hill, which would culminate in his suicide in 2004.  On a more amusing level, the stories also helped bump Labour out of office in the same year.  Dave Merritt's other achievement was designing the absurdly complicated Layerthorpe Bridge, which can only be navigated with a map, a compass and a keen knowledge of the stars.

 (to be finished)

 The station is a good place from which to start a walk into York's western stretches.  Handy, of course, and also logical.  Because the area we will be passing through is, to a large extent, Railwayville.  Take a look around the station before you depart.  It was opened in 1877, replacing an earlier one which was just a few hundred yards away but hindered by its location inside the city walls.  It remains a key link on the main eastern line between London and Edinburgh; which, unlike the main western line between Glasgow and the capital, works to a large extent.  The building itself is remarkable.  There's a bit of stone nonsense at the front, a half-hearted attempt to make the place look like a Roman amphitheatre.  The key feature, though, is the roof.  This is a huge creature of gently curving girders which covers the platforms like a metal cocoon.  It is the nineteenth century being honest about materials for once, stripping away the fripperies and presenting the bones as decoration.  I also note that it features in the architecture textbooks more than even the Minster.  There are, after all, many other gothic cathedrals elsewhere.  I'm not sure there is anything quite like the York Station roof.  Study it carefully the next time Virgin Railways decide to cancel your train and leave you stranded for about three sodding hours.

 For now, though, head down Queen Street which follows the curve of the Bar Walls.  To the right is the Railway Institute.  This is a kind of Working Man's Club-plus, a place for burly chaps to play sports, hold trade union meetings, drink foul real ales and partake in other traditional activities.  Ahead, on the corner of Blossom Street and Nunnery Lane, stands the Bar Convent.  York's holy women a diverse approach to modernity.  While the nuns of the Poor Clares on Hull Road still shut themselves away and – presumably – pray, the Bar Convent has gone for inclusion and diversification to fill the coffers.  There is a school, a museum, a conference hall and, for all I know, a sauna and bingo hall in there.  There may still be a crucifix or two lying around but they aren't very noticeable.  Turn right here, onto Blossom Street.

 Blossom Street quickly transforms into The Mount, The Mount into Mount Vale and that into Tadcaster Road.  Its character is equally uncertain.  At first it is a typically scrubby edge-of-city-centre artery.  There is a tattoo parlour, a classic greasy spoons takeaway and an Odeon cinema permanently on the verge of closure.  Occupying numbers 28 to 40 is the imaginatively named 28-40 Blossom Street, an office block so exotically hideous it can only have been designed as a dare.  Suddenly, though, the road seems to remember that it is approaching the racecourse and so might be seen by the better class of people.  The shops vanish; trees and stately hotels spring up in their place.  When this starts happening, make a hasty right turn onto Holgate Road.

 A brick terrace, holding more mundane shops, marks the start of Holgate Road.  There is nothing apparently remarkable as you walk past.  Turn back, though, and you see the terrace is about two inches thick at one end, a smaller version of the famous corner skyscraper in New York.  It seems to widen a little as it progresses but not much.  So how large can the shops really be?  Are they, in fact, anything except painted facades?  (I could just try going into one but that would be less enjoyable than fantasising.)  This is a good introduction to Holgate Road, one of York's odder streets.  Though an important thoroughfare, it winds as doggedly as a back lane.  Odds and ends which don't really belong anywhere have found a home here – a glassblower's, a piano shop, the York Bridge Society, the local Labour Party headquarters.  The Crystal Palace pub gives a good lesson on the gap between aspiration and reality; the sign depicts the beautiful building it is named after, the actual pub behind is a bleak brick box.  A little way beyond is the remarkable sight of Holgate Bridge.  The high stone parapets of the bridge a mass of criss-crossed girders.  These beams rise up and then bend sharply to form a roof, trapping you in an iron cage.  All of this looks purely functional but it is hard to see what the purpose might be.  A determined jumper could easily slip between the gaps; rain certainly passes through the roof easily enough.  It is likely that someone just had some spare girders and a joy of building things with them.  Perhaps they were also worried that our view of the huge volume of iron beneath the bridge, the main railway line, was obscured and wanted to compensate us.  Just past Holgate Bridge is St Paul's Church, which is equally in love with dark weathered stone.  It is gothic in the sense that Dracula and Hammer films are.  Look at the ominous turrets rising either side of its small rose window and the sky seems to blacken, a tongue of lightning snakes across the sky and a clap of organ music strikes up.  Holgate Road settles down for a while, sadly, being taken over by snooty looking guest houses.  The only notable vision is the Melton School of English, whose overbearing columns and losing battle against ivy gives it the appearance of a folly in the grounds of a stately home.  Finally, though, you come to the forlorn sight of the old carriage works.

 These were York's one attempt at serious heavy industry.  Not chocolate, not sugar; proper manly products.  Engine building first came to the city in 1842.  It moved out again at the turn of the century but a knock-on, carriage building and repairing, remained and grew in importance.  The Holgate site opened in 1881 and rapidly swelled in size.  Two and a half thousand men were employed there by 1900 and the Industrial Revolution had finally arrived at Jorvic.  And of course, like most serious heavy industry in Britain, the works no longer operate.  After contracting rapidly for several decades, the owners ABB finally swung the axe in 1995.  Some railway-related companies have since moved into a few of the great brick barns.  Essentially, though, the site remains a vacuum.  The closure ended a whole way of life and it is still debatable whether the city's economy has ever recovered.  However, when you read about the steady trickle of asbestos-related early deaths amongst former employees, it's hard to mourn the carriage works too much.

 The way forks just past a grim looking pub called The Fox, which holds the ghosts of a thousand railway men's livers.  Follow it to the right up Poppleton Road then take the first left.  And you will find yourself face to face with a windmill.  This may be a little surprising.  There are almost no signs nearby hinting at the thing.  There is also little in York's tourist literature suggesting that we still have one.  True, the street is called Windmill Road, but many are and it's normally just fanciful whimsy.  Windmills are normally hallowed sights, promoted mightily by the local authorities.  Everyone likes seeing them as they offer a straight byway back to a long-departed history.  There is indeed a Holgate Windmill Preservation Society devoted to this one.  On their inevitable website they talk of restoring its five sails – a rare feature, apparently – getting it working again and generally making a fuss of the thing.  But for now, the district of Holgate treats it as our forefathers would have done.  It's a windmill, they say.  And?  A lot more attention has been given to a nuclear fallout shelter recently opened to the public.  An odd place, Holgate.

 Double back to the Fox and take the other fork, up Acomb Road.  For a long while this is a standard leafy main road through the city's outskirts, the domain of over-priced hotels.  On the left there then appears a Church of the Latter Day Saints, cunningly and enigmatically disguised as a fire station.  Not long afterwards comes the sort of self-contained neighbourhood high street most commonly found in London boroughs.  There are banks, police stations, mini-markets, even a little Oxfam.  This is because we are now in Acomb; and Acomb tries hard to have nothing to do with the rest of the city.  They probably say they live "just outside York," creating an image of a dwelling in a picturesque little village.  The rest of us are happy with this semi-detachment.  We would prefer to have nothing to do with Acomb, which is actually a rather grim housing estate.  Most of York's more lurid crimes happen there and Foxwood Lane, officially York's Roughest Street, runs through its centre.  Actually the place isn't too bad and even Foxwood Lane, like all our no-go areas, generally holds nothing worst than a few kids in hoodies.  But if you want an in-depth guide to Acomb, riven with witty anecdotes from one's personal childhood, go somewhere else.  Otherwise walk as far as the Halifax, wonder why the hell it's got a turret sticking out of one side, and come back.

 

 The next walk, I’m afraid, starts at Walmgate.  This used to be one of the great slum areas of the city, a festering region of back-to-backs riddled with crime and disease.  Today… well, you probably won’t get smallpox but that's the best I can say.  Recent attempts to improve it remind me of The Simpsons joke, where urban regeneration meant replacing every crumbling building with a Starbucks.  On Walmgate they have become identical little blocks of flats instead.  The final step from The Simpsons has yet to be taken, however – turning the street drunks into mail boxes.  Walmgate still isn't the most cheerful place at night.  The one building of note is the new-ish headquarters of the York Evening Press.  The Press is a fine institution which has been gamely producing a daily newspaper for decades, despite the fact that almost nothing ever happens in York.  There is the occasional murder, which the Press accords the same blanket coverage most papers would give to world wars.  The rest of the time it generally has to make do with stories about builders seeking planning permission for new housing estates and locals opposing them.  There are generally about half a dozen of these controversies going on at once and the paper elevates each one into monumental, blood-soaked conflicts.  Read the Press too often and York turns from a drowsy backwater into a battleground of passionate ideologies.  I therefore recommend that you read the Press too often.

 If you want a break from Walmgate, and who wouldn't, then turn right down Thackray's Yard and carry on to Peel Street.  There you will find a small cemetery holding, amongst others, Dick Turpin's grave.  With Black Bess chucked in there too for good measure.  This is a slight shock if you're not expecting it.  Especially since, like the Holgate Windmill, the thing is barely signposted.  The parts of its history which York peddles with all its strength and the parts it ignores seems entirely arbitrary.  There is a house in the city centre once occupied by someone who inspired a minor character in Tristam Shandy.  In modern terms this is akin to being a contestant on Celebrity Love Island; but the house still has a prominent plaque announcing the fact.  But the last resting place of Dick Turpin and Black Bess, both of them genuinely famous, is totally overlooked.  Admittedly Turpin was a pretty vile murderer and rapist, rather than the swashbuckling hero of legend.  But we're encouraged to revere Guy Fawkes in York solely because he was born here, and he was just an incompetent proto-terrorist.  When teenagers, me and my friends were impressed when we stumbled upon the grave, partly because of its obscurity.  So much so that we once held a séance beside it.  This was abandoned half-way through when we heard a loud and mysterious knocking.  Concluding that it was Turpin's spirit trying to escape from the coffin, we fled.  Later, after sobering up, we conceded that the sound may also have been somebody nearby hitting a wall with a hammer, as occasionally happens.

 Return to Walmgate after this nonsense and continue to Walmgate Bar.  This is one of the largest and most curious of the Bar Walls gateways.  It is heavily fortified, extends a considerable way on the outer side and saw some heavy fighting during the Civil Wars.  During the sixteenth century, though, somebody saw fit to stick what is basically a large window box onto the inner side.  What should be a threatening mini-fortress suddenly becomes something rather twee and domesticated.  Even more oddly, the effect is actually rather attractive.  Practical too; people lived in Walmgate Bar, when it wasn't actually being fired at by cannons, right up to 1957.  Turn right once you pass through the bar.  You come onto Barbican Road, which gives another neat summary of Modern Trends.  A long-abandoned factory is visible on the left.  Past it is what was once quite a famous pub, the Spotted Cow, an is now a Chinese restaurant.  On the other side of the road, though thankfully hidden by trees, is the monument to civic stupidity which is the Barbican Centre. 

 A brief history of the Barbican Centre.  First came the Barbican Baths.  Externally they are truly hideous.  A normal building with a huge grey pyramid stuck on top, they make you want to conduct Aztec-style mass sacrifices; the victims exclusively being 1960's municipal architects.  They were public baths, however, and so offered one of the few forms of exercise which are both cheap and fun.  In the 1980's the council decided to build one of those multi-functional civic leisure centre things around the baths.  The results were bad externally, internally, commercially, artistically, in every way possible.  I watched The Fall there in 1995.  The realisation that he was essentially playing in a school gym brought the most profound look of disgust I've ever seen to singer Mark E Smith's face.  (And like all Fall fans, I've seen Mark E Smith disgusted many, many times.)  The Fall were a surprising coup for the Barbican Centre.  It became a byword for bands who'd had three months of chart success two decades ago.  It was their penultimate circle of hell before they drifted down to settle forever at the northern coastal resorts.  Nobody ever went to see them, unsurprisingly, and the whole centre has been closed for several years.  The council said they would listen to any rescue packages which involved re-opening the one pearl inside the whole blob of faeces – the baths.  Then they accepted the first one available, which didn't mention the baths at all.  And that's now been put into limbo because of local residents complaining about possible noise levels. Local residents who have willingly chosen to live on a damn great inner ring road.  Following the fortunes of the Barbican Centre doesn't really lift one's faith in human nature.

 Turn left down Heslington Road.  You are now heading towards the university.  And there is instantly a sense of having entered Studentville.  The large, old houses all seem to have been converted into their residences, front gardens untended and wheelie bins heaving with lager cans.  All businesses are fast food vendors, taxi firms and mini markets.  (So students can continue their baroque ritual called 'shopping for groceries.')  The whole street has an air of indolence, of hedonism… OK, I'm exaggerating a bit.  There's a guest house too, the Four Poster Lodge, the sign promising all its beds are that symbol of luxury which is basically just a glorified moth net.  And half way along Heslington Road is a large estate guarded by high walls which is the York Friends Retreat.

 High walls, incidentally, because the Retreat is a mental hospital first built in 1792.  It was pioneering for its day.  Established by the York-born philanthropist William Tuke and run by the Quakers, it was one of the first which did attempt to cure, or at least help, the insane; rather than throwing them into an asylum and forgetting about them.  Tuke's work, that of his descendents and the success of the Retreat was crucial in introducing laws which improved the conditions inside mental hospitals around the country.  The Retreat still has very high walls, however, around its doubtless attractive and soothing gardens, because even the enlightened were still nervous about mental instability in 1796.

 Just before the Retreat is a small gateway.  Go through it – you're allowed to, even if there's nothing telling you this – and head down a path.  The walls of the Retreat hem you in on one side, a line of allotments on the other.  Eventually they both fall away, however.  And, rather surprisingly, you find yourself in open countryside.  Or Walmgate Stray to be precise, one of those nicely untended jumbles of meadows and woodland which tend to appear arbitrarily on the edges of towns.  Ancient laws tend to preserve them, some never-rescinded twelfth century edict decreeing that all may use the land to graze their pigs and goats.  (Or whatever).  Walmgate Stray's appears to be running out, however.  Every time, I visit the commercial buildings seem to have encroached a little more from the west, the university sprawl likewise from the east.  Eventually I suppose it will just become the Stray Science Park, unless Barretts nips in there first.

 Turn left when the path hits a cycle rack.  The defences of the Retreat bends around with you.  Stern notices repeatedly warn you that the boundary actually extends "three feet south of the base of this wall."  I'm not sure why they didn't just build the wall three feet further south.  Continuing the Simpsons theme, if you ask them they'll probably slap their foreheads and utter a Homer-style "D'oh!"  At the junction with the cycle track, incidentally, is what appears to a very strange little wooden sculpture.  It may be the start of a rapidly curtailed totem pole.  But it may also be intended to represent one traffic cone placed on top of another, in honour of the students' traditional item of theft; because the track very quickly takes you to the University of York campus.

 I'm not going to try and guide you through this.  For one thing, I can't.  Like all good campuses, it has been thrown together with almost no logic at all.  Walkways appear abruptly and take you nowhere.  Buildings rear up to block your path, only to have holes drilled through them.  Car parks nestle quietly far from any roads.  Even I don't understand this campus and I know it fairly well.  A friend and I use to wander through it quite often, especially during our Sixth Form days.  We would gaze with longing at the dingy halls of residence and the colourful figures living in them.  And we would dream of the time when we too could stay up all night listening to the Doors, smoking dope and discussing Marx.  (Three activities I looked forward to with equal fervour and which proved to be equally fun.)  Becoming a student was basically our sole aim in life.  Which possibly explains why I, at least, had absolutely no idea what to do next after I'd finished being one and left university.  So have a wander around the campus.  It's one of the few (largely) pedestrianised zones you're allowed to walk through.  And you may indeed find knots of students listening to the Doors, smoking dope and discussing Marx; though these days they're more likely to be listening to Coldplay, drinking alcopops and discussing Big Brother.  If you're impatient, though, just head in an approximately straight line.  By hook or by crook you should eventually come to the heart of the campus – the duck pond.

 Ah yes, the duck pond.  The one single fact almost everyone knows about the University of York.  Mention it to students or graduates and you will get the same weary smile which Hartlepool residents give when reminded of their executed monkey.  Most edge-of-town campuses have extensive Students Union buildings in their centre.  York has what is actually a very large lake, stocked with mallards and pochards and all sorts of weirdly coloured crossbreeds.  And geese, of course, in increasing numbers.  You can walk all the way around it, I think, but only via some rather precarious stepping stones in places.  I'm not sure how many drunk students have either fallen or jumped in since the university was founded in 1963, though suspect we're nearing the million mark by now.

 At the head of the lake is the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall.  Internally it's just a big, pompous hall, where I once saw Hale and Pace while too young to know better.  (The audience was full of students who weren't, incidentally.)  Externally, though, the building seems to belong in Roswell.  Standing on a dangerously small base, it bulges out in bleak concrete layers.  The wide, multi-sided middle section is an impassive collection of black windows, supported by obtrusive arms.  Then the building narrows again and, for a final flourish, has what looks like a complex antenna atop the roof.  Its row of black doors always look as if they are about to suddenly disgorge green men demanding to be taken to our leaders.  Who will then wonder if it's worth conquering a world where the honking of geese and the strains of indie guitar music compete on equal footing.

 Close to the concert hall, a covered walkway actually runs straight and true up to a main road which slices through the campus.  Turn right here.  You pass between high grass bank which hold a rather daunting collection of important structures.  Particularly impressive are the new archives next door to the library, in the white panelled and black glass style I still think of as 'space age.'  Though I suppose we're really in the post-space age now, given NASA's recent 'achievements.'  Slightly undermining the hyper-modernity of the scene are the tatty old footbridges which stretch periodically across the road.  Soon rearing into view on the left is one of York's most distinctive structures.  If you approach the city from the east it is a beacon, visible even before the Minster.  It is two narrow, vertical metal tubes lashed to a slightly thicker one, separating at the base, capped with black at the top.  The structure seems impossibly tall in this flat city, especially if you stand right beside it and gaze up.  Precisely what it is, though, is a mystery to me.  I once heard a vague explanation about water storage which, like the thing itself, seemed a little thin.  I suspect it's actually a monumental sculpture crafted by a now-unfashionable artist which the university no longer wants to publicise but can't afford to demolish.  Across the road from this oddity is Heslington Hall.  It is an impressive sight, a creature of dark red brick and canted, stained glass bay windows.  A tall central façade rears up over a decorative front courtyard while two long arms reach towards the road in a slightly intimidating fashion.  Architecturally Heslington Hall went through three main phases.  Originally it was a blameless little Elizabethan manor.  In the mid-nineteenth century a man called Yarburgh Greame inherited and rebuilt it.  As you'd expect from someone with a name like that, his new additions were somewhat insane, including absurdly high chimney stacks and small pyramids atop the stairwells.  Sadly most of the dafter innovations were gradually sheared off by Greame's descendents.  The Hall moved from private hands to those of the RAF during the war before being bought by the university.  Pretty much everything around here, incidentally, is owned by the university nowadays.  Mansions, cottages, even stables have been swallowed up.  If you live close to the campus, always be on your guard or they'll get your house too.

 Go over the crossroads and you come into Heslington.  And no, you haven't suddenly wandered into the Cotswolds by accident.  Heslington has just always looked like this – honeysuckle covered cottages, sturdy pubs, quaint corner shops.  It's an ambience the residents are happy with.  So much so that they're fighting a vicious battle with the university (according to the Press at least) who are wanting to expand into nearby fields and transform/destroy the village.  Look a bit closer, though, and you'll see that most of the honeysuckle covered cottages are actually banks with handy cash points in their walls.  Which is pretty much the only reason why anyone ever visits Heslington.  You can continue down the main, and only, street, however.

(to be finished)

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