Up at the other end of town the start of the 21st century saw a new curvy landmark bridge, wheelchair and bicycle accessible. Here on our 19th century bridge we still have steps to climb. One day perhaps there will be a sweep of slope to carry us over the river, but not yet.

Lit up with bright white light, Scarborough Bridge looks friendlier than it used to. Some of its shabbier parts are hidden in shadow. Alongside the walkway on the right are new decks for the rail lines, put in place earlier this year, a massive and impressive feat of engineering.

While organised and orchestrated events alter the city’s landscape with light, the citizens make their own smaller marks on the city’s fabric. Here the light glints off the many ‘love locks’ attached to the mesh alongside the walkway of the bridge.

From the bridge, looking towards the city centre, where everything is illuminated just as it always is, by the ordinary street lighting and floodlighting we take for granted, and that trusty old moon.

On the opposite riverbank we found a large flock of geese, with many gently roosting, heads tucked under wings. We approached quietly and thoughtfully, not wanting to startle them. And stood by them, and stared out at the river and the lights. All gentle and calm. The York Rescue Boat went past, heading towards Lendal Bridge and the city centre beyond.

Other pedestrians approached, loud and chatty, and the geese shifted and woke and grumbled and a couple of the people passing made as if to grab one of them, and we stood by like guardians, ready to intervene if necessary. Watching the way the flock behaved, how the atmosphere changed.

And then homewards, back over Lendal Bridge, towards Bootham, passing the art gallery and Exhibition Square. Where the buildings and the fountain and the statue are illuminated, presumably nothing to do with the Illuminating York festival, just quietly pleasing all of the time. Like so many things around here.

The post Illuminated York: 31 Oct appeared first on York Stories Collective.

It was an interesting summer.

And we launch ourselves into a York full of collectives. We’re just one collective among many.

This launch has been very low-key, and involved one small action — unticking the ‘Discourage search engines’ option in the dashboard for the site. Which meant Google found us, apparently within an hour or two of that one small action. But we’ve been doing our collective thing for a while now, for months. Some of our wanderings and works have made it onto this site you’re looking at, some of them haven’t. They may appear later. Or not. It doesn’t really matter. But for now …

Illuminated York

Our investigation into the alleged horrors of the Micklegate area on a weekend evening after the races

A walk through the ‘Marble Arch’ tunnel

A summer solstice wander

The snickets project

Enquiries? Contact Lisa @YorkStories on Twitter or via email: collective@yorkstories.co.uk (And see the About page.)

The post Launch event appeared first on York Stories Collective.

“Pedantic perhaps – but when our heritage is being commodified and taken from us, sold back to us as an ‘experience’ then these minor things are quite irritating.”

(http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/forum/2010/077.html)

In June 2015 poems were stencilled onto the walls of some of the city centre alleys and passageways. The named, ancient ones. Straker’s Passage, Mad Alice Lane, etc. It was a repeat of an installation from 2014. Council approved and funded graffiti, essentially. Which in itself is thought-provoking, isn’t it.

The project, like many in recent years, appeared to be aimed at visitors, or recent residents, designed to attract people who didn’t know the city very well, encouraging them to explore its ‘hidden’ corners. I don’t think York residents think of the alleyways and passages as ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ or ‘unexplored’ — we use them all the time to escape from the tourists and get to places more quickly.

The poems were placed in what I’d call alleys or possibly passageways, or perhaps snickelways if I was writing for tourists. But I noticed that the publicity for the project and the press coverage of it referred to those city centre alleyways as ‘snickets‘ and ‘ginnels’. They’re both terms for cut-throughs, but to this York resident they seemed wrong, in this context of city centre alleyways.

In the York I grew up in, snickets were in the suburbs and ‘ginnels’ were in Leeds or Lancashire. I’d never heard the term ‘ginnels’ until I read, in the late 1980s, Mark W Jones’s now famous ‘snickelways’ book, where he refers to it, as it’s one of the words he used to make his portmanteau term (from snickets, ginnels, and alleyways).

If the project really had been exploring the ‘snickets’, as I understand the term, those poems would have appeared outside the city walls, in the middle of housing estates.

It’s a debatable point, of course, and some years back I was involved in a bit of a debate on Twitter. Starting with the question ‘snicket or snickelway?’ we’d discussed regional variations, and what a snicket was. It seemed that there was general agreement that a snicket was a suburban thing, not a city centre thing. One definition I found said a snicket was ‘partially vegetated’, which is another way of recognising the fact that they usually run between hedges (ie between suburban gardens, often) rather than walls, for all or part of their length.

Does it matter? Well, yes. What we call cut-throughs like this is part of a ‘distinctive local vocabulary’.

“In these times of mass media and global communications, it is comforting to think that regional lexical variation in British English is alive and well—in fact it seems to be right up many people’s alley. When linguists set out to collect distinctive local vocabulary, one of the classic questions informants are asked is “What do you call the narrow walkway between or along buildings?””

(http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/10/regional-words-alleyway/)

Language changes, of course, and it’s interesting how communities coming in to a place bring new words, how usage changes over time. Having now looked at many articles online referring to snickets/ginnels/snickelways I can see that there’s no longer a shared understanding and usage. It’s another example of local distinctiveness and character disappearing under dominant voices who often represent and describe the place in a way I don’t recognise or understand.

“Pedantic perhaps – but when our heritage is being commodified and taken from us, sold back to us as an ‘experience’ then these minor things are quite irritating.”

(http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/forum/2010/077.html)

If this project really had approached the snickets (of suburbia) with so much studied interest it would have been quite amusing.

But no one would do such a thing as they’re out in the suburbs, taken for granted, overlooked, ordinary. In this city there’s so much focus on the historic core, inside the walls and just beyond, even though the majority of us live outside of it, out in the suburbs, where Arts Council funded projects don’t go.

So we thought we would. We’ve included humble suburban snickets on our recent psychogeographic wanderings.

More info on the snicket poems, and how to contribute, on this link.

By: Lisa @YorkStories

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I hadn’t paid much attention to it in 2014, but in 2015 went down one of the alleyways, Black Horse Passage, which was soon to be enhanced with the poetry. I approached Black Horse Passage via the nearby Straker’s Passage, which had been one of my favourite places in the city centre. I’d loved it since first taking photos of it in 2004. I’d loved it because it was honest and grubby and ungentrified, with the Barbican Bookshop along one side of it, and graffiti often appearing on its walls near the weeds and ferns growing out of its bricks. In June 2015 Straker’s Passage, like so many other places, had become a building site, tight with scaffolding, and the picturesque yard at the end of it was full of men in high-vis jackets clearing out its old life to make way for the new.

I felt sad, but I’m used to feeling sad when I walk around York, watching the unselfconscious picturesque bits disappear, one after the other, redeveloped, selfconscious, posh.

At the corner, as I turned into the entrance to Black Horse Passage, bright paint greeted me, graffiti and tagging, in a range of shades and shapes. Jubilant and natural and anarchic. I loved it, felt lifted, felt lifted out of my sad and resigned mood of seconds earlier.

I know we’re all supposed to frown and object to graffiti, but increasingly I find that, in the right places, I like it. Perhaps an indication of how alienated I’ve felt as the needs and desires of the dominant voices have shaped the place and made it rather posh, similar, bland.

I thought about the poems project I’d read about, and wondered where they were going to apply them, and thought that actually I preferred what was here already, as it had happened naturally, part of the spirit of the place.

And the main issue, the question I thought really needed asking, is why some painting on walls gets council approval and funding whereas the stuff I was looking at and liking is seen as a nuisance, illegal.

So it’s apparently okay to paint words on walls and you can even get council funding for it if you’re a proper published poet or an Arts Council funded project, but if you’re a local kid from Tang Hall or Chapelfields it’s vandalism and you face prosecution if caught.

Officially sanctioned Arts Council funded graffiti was obliterating the authentic unfunded graffiti that was there before. It seemed like just another example of local distinctiveness and authenticity being wiped out, whitewashed, replaced with some nice middle-class thing. And, personally, I’m getting quite tired of that.

And then there was the thought-provoking issue of the language used to describe these locations.

By: Lisa @YorkStories

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Ouse Bridge, Saturday night. A Saturday night when the races were on. A short film.

According to press reports over the summer York has become a ‘no go’ area at the weekends. So we thought we’d go there specially, to see just how dreadful and shocking it was.

Nothing particularly shocking was noticed. Though there was a man playing bagpipes.

We’ve been hearing a lot of consternation about stag and hen parties, particularly those carrying inflatable phalluses, and news of York’s alleged problem with ‘gigantic willies’ even reached the national press. The headline reported what ‘locals say’. Or some of them. Some locals recognise that rowdiness and bawdiness of visiting groups of people having a wild old time at the weekend is also part of York’s heritage and culture, and always has been.

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Envelope found on the pavement by the river reminded us that it was ‘Father’s Day’. If Dad deliberately tossed this envelope onto the floor he wasn’t setting a very good example, was he.

On the riverside railings, interesting information on Anglian York, and a fearsome-looking fish

Increasingly rare sighting – a litter bin. Where that Dad should have disposed of his envelope.
And ‘Layer’ again — apparently York’s most active graffiti tagger.

… And round the corner, the picturesque layers of Lendal Tower.

On the opposite bank, the interesting roof of Barker Tower, with bright lichen.

Dear old All Saints Lane … once a delightful short cut-through, now just another gated place.

‘Flares’, on Tanner Row. We spent a long time trying to remember what it used to be called, years ago.

Moooo. Unexpected cattle, in a passageway on North Street

Tiled doorway on Micklegate. Was this Cross the fishmonger? Or a different Cross? It’s not a fishmonger’s now, anyway.

On what’s generally a disappointingly gloomy solstice evening, a dramatic and late burst of sunlight

New hardware shop on Micklegate: Granville’s of York

Cleaned-up frontages on the slowly gentrifying Micklegate, and a grubbier neighbour

And that same late sunlight catches and illuminates one side of Micklegate Bar

So few garages in the city centre now, where once they were many. A surprisingly central one, on Priory St

Sad and lonely chair in a small seating area on Nunnery Lane

Splendid Scarcroft School, looming out of the gathering gloom

On Albermarle Road, always good to meet a local cat …

… which was in the middle of a bit of a stand-off with this other cat, both hanging about near the allotments …

… this one perhaps wanted to guide us to this lovely rusty bit of old metal …

Behind a wall, in the grounds of All Saints School, a hen party remnant

Heading back, over Dicky Bridge in Holgate, which has always and forever been decorated with graffiti, over and over

Dusk falls over the east coast main line, heading south

And we pass under the lines heading north, while a train rumbles overhead.

And emerge from the tunnel into the darkening night of the longest day.

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A very short film. You’ll need the sound enabled, to hear the train going over.

On the evening of the solstice we were out for a walk and passed through here. It’s not the most pleasant place in York, but it’s certainly atmospheric, particularly when the trains go over while you’re in it. There’s a bit where you’re not enclosed as much by the whiteness as a dark space looms above your head. This has pigeons roosting in it, hence the pause and change of camera angle at one point.

If that doesn’t appeal, here’s a still image instead.

And yes, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, as people always say there is.

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By: Lisa @YorkStories. More …

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