York hotels are not needed so convert old buildings into homes - Yorkshire Post Letters

Thanks to your timely report and editorial (The Yorkshire Post, April 28), my wife and I were well prepared to enjoy York’s recent inspiring Festival of the Walls, which has prompted fresh thoughts about walls and the cities they enclose.

Some city walls still defend an unchanging historic core. But most, like York’s, surround a cityscape reflecting centuries of gradual organic change, later buildings usually harmonising with what is already there. In Venice these more ordinary buildings are cherished alongside the city’s wonders as Venezia minore: lesser Venice.

In contrast, ‘lesser York’ within the walls is seriously threatened by development.

Some developers have responded admirably to Historic England’s call, reported in your pages (The Yorkshire Post, April 14), to recycle rather than destroy existing buildings, saving the climate as well as the streetscape. Helmsley Group plans 15 flats and a restaurant inside impressive Ousegate House, providing as it says “a continued use for a city centre structure”. Its plans for nearby Coney Street suggest a similar sympathetic approach.

But tragically, other developers still ignore Historic England’s call. They see it as their mission not to blend into lesser York, but to break it up with incongruous new landmarks.

On Peasholme Green, Clegg Construction will demolish the quiet, unassuming Carpetright building, which it claims “brought nothing to the area”, for a ‘spectacular’ four-storey, 188-bed hotel – York’s sixth Premier Inn.

Worse still, North Star, “Yorkshire’s premier creative property asset management company”, has destroyed two pleasant buildings near Micklegate Bar to build a grotesque fake medieval – sorry ‘modern medieval’ – aparthotel. “The new hotel will be a great addition to this magnificent street, and we are pleased to have successfully completed the demolition stage”. Says it all, really.

And now North Star proposes to redevelop handsome 80-year-old Swinson House in Piccadilly by destroying it to build an unlovely six-storey ‘hometel’ next to 1,000-year-old St Denys’s Church – and within 150 metres of three other hotels.

What York needs is affordable housing. A sign of the times is your recent report (The Yorkshire Post, April 16) that York’s charming Mount Royale Hotel will be closed and converted into housing – because of competition from other hotels.

So come on, North Star, don’t destroy Swinson House to build yet another surplus hotel – keep it and turn it into flats instead.