Thanks to Sandra I’ve also added some information and links to two interesting and connected stories from World War Two, on the page about the camouflaged gasometer.

Lisa

Victorian Layerthorpe breaks through the 20th century tarmac (7 Nov 2015)

In August 2015 I went for a couple of wanders around the Layerthorpe area and took some photographs. I was so busy looking at the buildings that I didn’t notice until a follow-up visit this remnant of old Layerthorpe, underfoot.

The street of Layerthorpe is now occupied by light industrial and commercial units, late 20th century buildings with forecourts. At the edge of one of these forecourts the tarmac has broken up in a couple of places to reveal the older surface beneath. These are the distinctive hexagonal paviours common in many of the city’s 19th century back alleys. We’ve admired them before on the York Stories site. They were also used at road edges, as can be seen in streets off Burton Stone Lane (and presumably many other areas of York).

So this paving marks what was the edge of a road or a wide back alley, or perhaps the entrance to a yard or passageway. But which one? Downhill Street perhaps? Chicory Yard? The long-vanished Portland Place, shown on the 1852 map?

Here’s the location from a different angle (taken on an earlier visit, before the steel fencing blocked it off). I’m standing in what would have been the road/alley/passageway in question, looking across to the other side of Layerthorpe.

View from one side of Layerthorpe to another. Note Victorian paving showing through broken tarmac

On my right, not far away, was the most prominent remnant of old Layerthorpe: a building housing the ‘Hungry Horace’ café. An obviously 19th century building, which we’ll cover on another page. Apart from that it’s hard to find landmarks to help place and name this road/alley, as it was.

It’s very difficult, standing in the middle of that massively changed landscape, to work out where the old 19th century streets used to be. Bilton Street has vanished completely. Redeness Street is still there but it doesn’t run in a straight line to meet Layerthorpe as it used to — it bends away behind the buildings since erected on the Layerthorpe entrance, and emerges on Hallfield Road.

Below I’ve included the link to the relevant bit of Google Street View, and a link also to the relevant bit of the 1852 map. If you can identify what street/yard these old paviours mark, please add a comment.

Google Street View, 2015 — the red painted post to the right is the one pictured on my photo above

York 1852 map — of the Layerthorpe area

This photo shows the camouflage paint applied to the gasometer in the Layerthorpe area during the Second World War. (The Foss Islands chimney was similarly camouflaged.)

… on the sidewall of our house there was machine gun bullet holes were they been trying to blow the gastanks up. Our shop was an airaid shelter and my great granddad, who lived with us at no6, refused to get out of bed when the window was blown in on him. thats layerthorpe grit.
— Sheila Blakelock, comment on ‘Lost Layerthorpe’, www.yorkstories.co.uk

Sandra Wreglesworth’s father remembered that time too. Dennis Joseph Durkin was stationed on the gasometer on the night of the Baedeker raid in April 1942, as a 17 year-old volunteer in the Home Guard.

“Me and my friend were up the top of the gasometer with binoculars looking for lights so we could report them to the black-out wardens.”

— Home Guard volunteer relives wartime raid on York, The Press, 20 April 2007.

Mr Durkin’s account followed an earlier piece in the paper: ‘Luftwaffe pilot says sorry for bombing York’.

“On that night my target was the gasometer”

— Willi Schludecker, on his visit to York 65 years later, reported in The Press.

More information

On the York Stories website:

Stephen’s memories of that night in April 1942

Baedeker raid: civilian deaths

The bombed church of St Martin’s, Coney St, now serving as ‘a shrine of remembrance for all who died in the two world wars, a chapel of peace and reconciliation between nations and between men’.