No one in the column of tourists making their way to York Minster along the city wall even glances at Northern House. The slab of beige 1960s architecture is not a building that provokes much passion.
But the layers of mud beneath it are a different matter. A plan to demolish Northern House to unearth the centuries of history below and create a new Roman-themed visitor centre, hotel and apartments has caused a row among archaeologists.
York Archaeology Trust (YAT) has teamed up with a local developer, North Star, to propose the creation of an enormous underground museum filled with the Roman artefacts they are confident will be found below Northern House.
The “Roman quarter” development – to be called Eboracum, the name of the Roman precursor to York – would be funded by Northern House’s replacement: a 10-storey building with an 88-room hotel, 153 apartments and office space.
Yet the plan has opponents ranged against it from Historic England, which described it as “confused and contradictory”, to the Council for British Archaeology.
“We’ve been quite shocked by the brutal approach taken with this particular development,” said Neil Redfern, the executive director of the CBA, which represents more than 600 institutions. Normally archaeologists are brought on board after a development is proposed, he said, and digs are no bigger than necessary.
“What this proposal is doing is saying, no, we would like a visitor centre and to get that visitor centre we want to dig a very, very big hole to find the material that we might then put in that visitor centre. And to afford that, we’re going to need an extremely large building on top.”
“The present Northern House is certainly no beauty,” said Johnny Hayes, a former independent York city councillor and veteran of several town planning campaigns. “But it was built before conservation areas were in place and two wrongs do not make a right. If this is built I think it will become one of York’s most hated buildings.”
There are many unanswered questions, Redfern said. Only a third of the site would be excavated, so what happens to the rest? The YAT would have no more than two years, and digging down six metres to Roman levels means going through Viking and Anglian deposits – what happens if they make an extraordinary find? What happens to the visitor centre plan if they find nothing? What if the developer goes bust, or sells on the planning permission?
Sheltering from April hailstones at the rear of Northern House, David Jennings, YAT’s chief executive, has answers to some of these questions. Techniques have improved since the 1980s, and archaeology is all about dealing with the unexpected, he says, confident that the two-year deadline would not compromise the dig. The reason they would excavate only a third of the land is because Northern House was built partly on an old petrol station, which had fuel tanks dug deep into the ground, so a lot of material was lost long ago.
“This really is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” Jennings said. “It’s 30 years since we’ve seen a dig of this scale.” The Aviva building next door, built in the 1990s, was the last large-scale excavation. It revealed that there was a Roman civilian camp on the southern bank of the River Ouse, with a road roughly below Tanner Row leading to a bridge to a legionaries’ camp.
“We’re going to be able to start to explain the connections around the old Roman road, the economy of the city, the meats they ate. In the previous digs we found a dormouse, and bits of Roman tents in the name of a centurion who is referred to at Hadrian’s Wall, Sollius Julianus,” Jennings says.
Only this area, with its hodge-podge of architectural styles created before conservation areas were invented, could bear such a development, Jennings said. Elsewhere in York the buildings are smaller, so developers are less likely to need to pay for archaeological investigations.
“This is one of the few places that it can be done, because of the location, the scale, and the relationship between us and a local development community,” Jennings said. “It comes down to whether the emphasis is placed on conservation or on new discovery.”
York is the home of British archaeology – the CBA’s headquarters are five minutes’ walk from Northern House. The city is a site of international significance partly because so much history happened nearby, from Constantine’s proclamation as emperor in 306 to the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, but also because the city’s waterlogged earth has preserved so much material.
Eboracum would be twice the size of the hugely successful Jorvik Viking Centre, the result of a similar archaeological dig from 1976 to 1981, also conducted by YAT – before York’s Coppergate shopping centre was built.
The Coppergate dig was successful because the lack of oxygen in the water allowed the preservation of leather shoes, the timber from two-storey Viking houses, and even the pungent lime-sealed cesspits whose aromas can still be experienced at the Jorvik centre. Britain’s Covid-battered tourism industry is back to pre-pandemic levels in York, and earlier this month saw the opening of a new City Walls centre and the reopening of Clifford’s Tower, the motte and bailey castle built by William the Conqueror during his genocidal northern campaign.
“The beauty of York is that the archaeology is both below and above ground, because the above-ground expression of buildings, street patterns and burgage plots is a reflection of what’s below the ground,” Redfern said. “York’s most valuable attribute is its human scale which emanates from the very first people who went there and started to develop this place.
“This building just completely cuts across that.
“We know York Archaeological Trust well,” Redfern added. “They are a good archaeological unit. I just don’t think they’ve chosen the right option on this one.”
