How you BEAN?

Some old neighbours names carved on bricks –  Stephen Lee Hodgkins, 2022.

Just behind York’s ‘Bile Bean’ Ghost sign on Lord Mayors walk is Monk Bar car park. These bricks were recovered in late 2021 from a hole being dug there.

The hole was dug to install some electrical car charging points. The bricks were revealed as if once part of the foundations of a house wall.  Previously, this area was not a car park, but the many terraced homes of Newbiggin Street and Groves Lane. 

‘Cook’s York Directory of 1922’, published by the Yorkshire Gazette Newspaper held at Explore York Library and Archive, list some of the names of people living in those streets at that time.

Brayshaw, Christina ANNE.  20 Groves Lane.

BEAN, William. 17 Newbiggin Street.

TATE, Sarah Elizabeth. 19 Groves Lane.

WARD, Tom. 24 Groves Lane. 

I have walked along Groves Lane many times not really thinking about it as a street of homes where families and folk lived, worked and played some 100 years ago. But these bricks possibly were part of the homes, or their neighbours’ homes that these people and their families lived in.

I wonder who these people were, what they were like and what life was like for them. What made them laugh, what made them cry? Did they know each other and what they might have said to one another when going about their everyday lives. Did they ask how each other, how they had been? And what were their replies? 

I am now wondering about who might, in 2122, 100 years from now, be walking down Groves Lane, what they will be like, how might they live and where they might be going?

Published by SLH