York Historic Environment Record

Museum and Lecture Hall, incorporating St Mary's Abbey remains in basement. Abbey remains comprise vestiges of late C12 Chapter House vestibule screen and vaulting shafts 1298-1307, late C13 slype, early C14 parlour and late C14 Warming House. Museum built 1827-29, lecture hall dated 1912, both with later alterations. Museum by William Wilkins, lecture hall by E Ridsdale Tate, both for the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. MATERIALS: museum of ashlar, Tempest Anderson Hall of shuttered concrete; museum roof of slate, shallow pitched, partly glazed, with stone stacks. EXTERIOR: museum: 1-storey 9-bay front on low plinth with pedimented tetrastyle portico of fluted Greek Doric columns on stepped podium. Central double doors of 6 sunk panels in moulded surround with cornice hood on scroll brackets. Windows flanking doors are narrow 8-pane sashes, elsewhere 12-pane sashes over moulded sill band, all in architraves with cornice hoods. Boldly projecting cornice across full width of front and portico beneath parapet masking roof. Plaque within portico records that "The Yorkshire Philosophical Society transferred the Yorkshire Museum and Gardens to the Citizens of York on Jan. 2nd 1961." Tempest Anderson Hall: entrance front of 2 storeys 7 bays with basement to 2 left end bays with 1-storey 1-bay projecting porch on high plinth towards right end. Front and right return articulated in giant order Doric pilasters and antae carrying full entablature and parapet. Porch similarly articulated with heavy moulded cornice to flat roof. Steps up to porch lead to panelled double doors beneath flat canopy on scroll brackets in left return: front has small-pane window in eared architrave with moulded sill flanked by pilasters. Irregular fenestration reflects variable floor levels. One basement window altered to square bay with plate glazing, remainder are of 2 mullioned small-pane lights with metal glazing bars. Upper windows are generally 1-pane fixed lights, some with transoms, in moulded architraves with moulded sills over sunk-panel aprons. At right end of cornice, integral rainwater goods have hopper initialled TA, dated 1912. INTERIOR: of Museum. Basement galleries contain a reconstruction of the Chapter House vestibule of St Mary's Abbey incorporating remains of the original. Triple arched
entrance screen had piers carved with chevron and stiff-leaf mouldings and detached shafts with waterhold bases and spurs: vaulting piers have alternately filleted and keeled shafts and roll-moulded bases. Base courses of the slype incorporate a wallbench and remains of 4 buttresses with attached shafts with moulded bases and capitals; base courses of north wall of parlour incorporates bases of vaulting shafts. In a separate room, the hearth, one moulded jamb and a carved corbel head to the lintel of the Warming House fireplace survive. On ground and first floors, altered interior retains 4-bay central area colonnaded in giant order Composite columns and responds supporting ceiling coffered with beams enriched with guilloche and egg-and-dart mouldings: ceiling panels behind colonnades contain moulded rosettes. Staircase to first floor has open string, stick balusters, serpentine handrail and turned newels on shaped curtail steps. Temple Anderson Hall was first listed 24/06/83. (An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of York: RCHME: Outside the City Walls East of the Ouse: HMSO London: 1975-: 12-13; 44-45; Murray H, Riddick S & Green R: York through the Eyes of the Artist: York City Art Gallery: 1990-: 68).
Listing NGR: SE5995752133

Derived from English Heritage LB download dated: 22/08/2005

NMR Information:

Alternate Name (Alternative) TEMPEST ANDERSON HALL
Alternate Name (Alternative) YORKSHIRE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Related event: (UID 613515) INVESTIGATION BY RCHME/EH ARCHITECTURAL SURVEY
Architectural Survey 14-NOV-1995