CARVING OUT A NEW NEIGHBOURHOOD

York Minster has a plan. The stunning building and its surrounding neighbourhood are to be sustained and enhanced, ensuring the Minster and its Precinct continue to flourish. The proposals are to retain its deep heritage, celebrate its cultural significance, and create public spaces for future generations to embrace and enjoy. Within this, there will be a Centre of Excellence to teach ancient craft skills required to preserve the Minster’s architecture. We spoke to the Director of Works and Precinct, Alexander McCallion, to discover more about the York Minster Neighbourhood Plan.

To many people, York Minster is the symbol of this city. Over 800 years old, it towers above the skyline - but with a building like this that has been here for so long, it takes a huge amount of money and care to look after it.The Neighbourhood Plan is all about ensuring that future generations can enjoy York Minster as we do today.

The whole Precinct has evolved throughout its history. Originally much more enclosed, the biggest changes to the Precinct were created by Dean Duncan in the 1850s. It’s continually evolving and changing. That’s the narrative we’re trying to get across through the Neighbourhood Plan - that things cannot remain in aspic, they always have to change and evolve.

This is the first Neighbourhood Plan of its kind, as it’s the first time a cathedral or heritage estate has used this route to create a route map for its future. York hasn’t had an adopted local plan since 1956, so there was no planning policy within which to deliver these ambitious changes. It’s all very well having a vision, but if you can’t deliver and get planning permission, it won’t be realised. That’s why we put together the York Minster Neighbourhood Plan.

York Minster is held in a lot of people’s hearts, not just in this city, but nationally and internationally - so to bring people along with us for these changes has meant huge amounts of public consultation. This has been a community planwe’ve worked closely with City of York Council and Historic England and after each round of public consultation we’ve significantly changed the plan. It’s been a city partnership and that’s how it should be, because people here love the Minster.

As the Minster’s Department of Works and Precinct, we are first and foremost a maintenance department responsible for conservation and restoration of the cathedral. There are 42 members in the team, from gardeners and joiners, to the stonemasons whose heritage craft skills are necessary to care for a complex estate such as this. We also work closely with York Glaziers Trust, which specialises in stained glass restoration. A big part of the vision for the Neighbourhood Plan is the Centre of Excellence, which will create a world class campus facility for research, education and training in ancient craft skills.

We have a very strong apprenticeship programme and this city is expensive, so providing residential accommodation and creating new facilities were important parts of the vision. It is something feel strongly about: the facilities haven’t had the investment needed for a long time because there hasn’t been the money to do it. While we’ve already made some progress,we have a huge amount of conservation and restoration ahead of us. The trajectory outlined in the Neighbourhood Plan is around 30 years, but the effects of its implementation will reverberate long after our lifetimes. The wonderful thing about our roles is that we are a little speck of dust in this long 2000-year history of this site.

With the York Minster Fund and Research Development Project we also started looking at how we could embrace modern technology. Our apprentices learn how to do everything the traditional way, but we will introduce them to new training elements such as the use of ComputerAided Design (CAD). York is renowned for being experts in the care of heritage, and we’re embracing modern technology as a tool to help care for the past.

The core thread of The Neighbourhood Plan is ensuring a sustainable future for the Minster in three main areas: environmental sustainability, financial sustainability, and heritage craft skills, so that we’ve always got a skilled workforce here to look after the building. We are really driving the net-zero agenda. There’s an application for solar panels on the roof of the Minster and the first solar slates in the Precinct are already generating 11,000 kilowatts of power a year on our new York Minster Refectory restaurant. Our journey to de-carbonisation has started at quite a pace, which then sets the standard for the rest of the city.

The Refectory will open this spring, with extensive public realm, and a new public park, Minster Gardens. Our new pocket park, College Green, will also open on PalmSunday. We are also looking to deliver further public realm through Queen Elizabeth Square, and the first piece of this jigsaw puzzle was the creation of the statue of the late Queen which was unveiled by the King in November.

The original idea in the Neighbourhood Plan was to erect the statue to mark Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee. In the end, it was the first statue to be unveiled in the late Queen’s memory so it took on an increased poignancy. From the very beginning of the idea, the statue had to be created by one of the Minster’s stonemasons, and we are all very proud of what Richard Bossons achieved.

“The Church House project will convert one of our old offices into residential, and St. William’s College will become the Chapter’s hub, converted into offices, conference rooms and banqueting space. Any income generated will make sure our programme can continue on the ongoing restoration of the cathedral

The wider benefit of the Neighbourhood Plan and the Centre for Excellence is that both will continue to broaden our horizons as a city. At York Minster we’re embracing the future and preserving the past, and that can be seen in the essence of the design - it’s contemporary architecture brought to life using traditional skills, creating a unique and inspiring space.

Stonemason Harriet Place tells us about the traditional skills required to preserve York Minster’s vast and extraordinary architecture and how using modern technology wisely can complement these heritage crafts.

I’ve been a stonemason here for 12 years and at YorkMinster for 20 - I worked in the shop before deciding to make it! I now teach stonemasonry to the apprentices. We still teach the traditional wayby hand - so that everyone learns the original skills.

We’ve got a small team and a lot of stone! There are so many areas that have to be done at different times - I work on the Mason’s Lodge but am currently prolonging stone elsewhere (using a mortar mix called St.One which mixes sympathetically with the original stone), ready for two windows to go in.

We have 68 unprotected medieval stained-glass windows that date to the 1470s, and the same corrosion and erosion you get on stone you also get on glass - so we’re in a race against time to put this protection on. We also found some original medieval stone that had tooling marks where the Victorians had wanted it smooth and sanded - so we restore the medieval way, to the oldest point that we can - 800 years ago.

A few of the stonemasons are learning how to integrate technology with the traditional hand craft. Photogrammetry, digital scanning, and using state of the art, cutting edge bridge saws and CMC saws. An example of where this can be introduced is a stone I’m currently working on that weighs just under half a tonne- to mason it by hand would take a few months. Using a CMC saw on large stones like this will really reduce the time and it can still then be carved by hand. The result of the masonry is similar to that of other existing stones so we would not be losing any skills. It’s about doing more restoration for the same cost without diluting quality.

The history of this city is embedded in this building and we want to look after it. The amount of restoration can be overwhelming and we get no government funding, so the responsibility lies entirely with Chapter. Visitor income makes up half of our funding. When I’m working in the lodge, visitors often ask how it’s raised and we say “it’s from you”. Everything you donate goes to help us maintain this beloved building.