York, Rowntree Park

Gate of peaceI thought, when I first caught site of this structure in York’s Rowntree Park, that it must have been moved here from elsewhere. It looked old, with its silvered oak timbers and melllow bricks – certainly older than the date of 1919–21, when Rowntree and Company donated the park to the city as a memorial to its workers who fell in World War I. The structure’s similarity to a church lychgate, and the fact that it does not stand at the entrance to the park but within it, added to my confusion.Looking more closely, though, I could see that things were not quite as they seemed. Although there is a timber framework, the side walls have a much larger area of brick than in a medieval or Tudor timber-framed building – those bricks are doing much of the heavy lifting. And it turns out that this gateway was built for the park, its architect probably being Fred Rowntree or W. J. Swain, as in the nearby multi-purpose house and café building in my previous post. Material online about…