York Historic Environment Record

At the bottom of Peckitt Street, on the right-hand side, is a house which forms a punctuation mark in the view along the Ouse. We read it nowadays as part of the fire station and courts complex but it was there long before they arrived. The owner, builders and original occupiers of this dwelling are currently unknown. A York Corporation plan of about 1879 shows the house accompanied by a substantial garden, at the end of which was another building, possibly a coach house and stable, built onto the side of the Sunday school; the plot boundary, however, clearly separates this building from the school. On the first large-scale Ordnance Survey (1851) the plot had been a walled garden, lying between the Clifford House garden and the river. It is in essence a two-storey hip-roofed villa with a gable breaking out on the river frontage and a stumpy saddle-backed tower on the Peckitt Street side; both provide visual incidents and the latter gives the villa some standing against the taller group of houses in Friar’s Terrace (c1855). The principal exterior elevations of the Lodge display a number of features typical of Victorian Gothic domestic architecture including gables, bay windows, arches, towers, varied roof lines, elaborate porches and medieval details such as lancet windows. Its adaptation for use as private office space has seen little alteration to its original layout or footprint, although a number of original features, particularly the fireplace surrounds, were removed.