Shiver me (half) Timbers

The Herbert House covered with white plaster in the 1860s. There appear to be stone blocks known as quoins at the corner of the building which can be used to provide stability, however in this case they have been painted on. (www.yorkpress.co.uk)

So if these half-timbered buildings are now thought to be what makes York York, what fills the visitors with joy and the locals with pride, then why are they all covered up in these photos? Well the simple answer to that is that there were times when people were not as proud as of the historical buildings of York as we are now. At times, downright embarrassment might be a better description.

A city's prestige waxes and wanes over time. Any city will go through the cycles of fashion to some degree or other. Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down. York was definitely up in the late mediaeval period with the river port, the guilds, the church and the walls all providing a gravitational pull into the city. However, the good times couldn't last forever and over time, those things that used to be a bonus gradually became redundant or even downright disadvantageous. Perhaps the biggest change of all being that the bigger ships of the early modern period did not want to sail up to inland river ports like York, preferring instead to make port on the coast. From that point on, York was on an inevitable downward swing.

And then the tastes in buildings changed as well. Perhaps it was the trauma of fires and wars in the 17th Century that persuaded the people of the country to switch to brick and stone for buildings even on the scale of shops and houses. Or perhaps that change in building styles would have happened anyway. Either way, by the 18th Century, timber frame buildings were a relic of the past and could not impress anyone who was used to buildings constructed from more substantial and less flammable materials. Travel guides, that were becoming a thing by this time, were incredibly snooty about York. The city old but not ancient, it was narrow and cramped, it was irregular and chaotic. It was not what people were after. Towns like Harrogate were in fashion with wide open streets and strong stone buildings. They were new, they were impressive, they were the now. 

Not that there was a complete lack of money coming into York at the time. The church, courts and governance of the region were still based in the city and there were plenty of well attended social events on the calender at the racecourse and elsewhere. Even a local bigwig like the Earl of Carlisle may have been spending his fortune building Castle Howard but he still needed a city centre property as well, choosing to rent part of the St. William’s College building. There are also no shortage of grand Georgian and early Victorian structures that were constructed in the city including the Mansion House, Assembly Rooms and the houses on streets such as Castlegate and St. Leonard's Place. However, unlike a city in upswing period of it's history, there was no large scale flattening and rebuilding of York in this era and many of the mediaeval structures survived. So what to do if you owned a timber framed building in a world that wanted masonry? Well if you couldn't knock your house down and rebuild it then the next best thing would be to put a plaster skin over the building to hide the embarrassing bits. Once that skin was there, who's to say what was under it? It could be brick, it could be stone, it could be anything. 

But then, inevitably, the pendulum began to swing back in York's favour again in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. This time the city would be reinvented as a tourist destination as the people now decided they would love to travel miles in order to view the old, narrow and chaotic street of York. All of sudden building owners were desperate to scrape away the ugly plaster skin and reveal the beautiful timber frame below. That lost look of York was rediscovered, put front and centre in all promotional campaigns and became part of the look of what makes York York.

Which brings us to the slightly knotty issue of authenticity. Without getting into long Ship of Theseus (or Trigger's Broom) style arguments about the exact buildings materials that are still in place, I think we can agree that plenty of buildings in the centre of York are authentic mediaeval, half timber frame buildings. They are still the same buildings, on the same spot, with the same frames as they have always been. With some caveats. All of the repair, restoration, covering and uncovering of these buildings over the years have taken their toll. For example, the plaster on the front of The Herbert House was scraped away as part of restoration work that took place in the 1920s. One thing is clear from photographs of the building before and soon after this restoration is that the long bressummers in the middle of the building were not nearly as bowed as we're used to seeing now. They had laid flat, strong and true for centuries up until this restoration but it was only in the following decades that the bowing really began. It is safe to say the 1920s restoration was not...perfect and in the 1980s there was further major work required to underpin the front of the building to stabilise the house and stop any further distortion. So that rather attractive look that it has now certainly isn't deliberate but at the same time it not entirely authentic. Other restoration carried out in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries would pass even less muster to modern eyes. Sometimes authenticity at the time was seen mostly as vibe and restorers were less bothered about actual details as much as what felt mediaeval to them. Evidence of this approach to restoration can be found throughout the city with walls, gateways and the like having superfluous towers, turrets and arrow holes added at this time. And some of York's half timbered buildings went through the same process. Without naming and shaming, it is certainly true that some of the old buildings so admired by visitors of York could viewed more as hybrid buildings that are simultaneously both old and modern. Some of these hybrid buildings, such as Barley Hall, make no secret of this fact. Others are a bit more coy. 

But the good news is that there are still some buildings in the city with their mediaeval half timbered frames still hidden behind their early modern plaster skins. So you never know, sometime in the future there may be even more shops, houses and pubs across the city who are able to shed their outer skin and reveal their glory from below. Like butterflies emerging from a cocoon. Thereby strengthening once more that particular and distinctive look that makes York York.