A house with a history

Colliergate is one of York's oldest streets. The name first appears in 1303, when colliers brought charcoal up the Foss to sell here, and before that it was counted as part of the Shambles. In the Middle Ages it was lined with timber-framed houses with jettied gables, and some of that older York survives inside this building.

The house you see today was built in 1748 for Ralph Yoward, an attorney who collected the Archbishop of York's rents. He took two or three older houses, joined them together behind a new front of orange brick and created a five-bay Georgian townhouse. The cast-iron rainwater head on the front still carries the date 1748, his initials and a cherub's head.

Inside, Yoward spent lavishly. A cantilevered main staircase climbs the house with three balusters to a tread, plain, fluted and twisted, beneath a round-headed stair window. On the first floor the saloon has egg-and-dart plasterwork and a chimneypiece with Corinthian pilasters and a shell in a broken pediment, copied from Batty Langley's pattern book of 1745. Pevsner called it the best house on Colliergate.

The top of the house belonged to the servants. A building survey of the attic found the bells that once called them downstairs, a room that may have been the housekeeper's, panelled cupboards and six-panel doors with their old ironmongery. One of those old roof timbers now runs across the brick wall of Bedroom 5, The Minster. The carpenter's assembly mark, VIII, is still cut into the oak there, beside a row of angled slashes thought to be witch marks: protective marks cut to keep evil out of a house.

Around 1830 the house was divided in two. The rear was raised by a storey, a second staircase was put in, and part of the ground floor became a shop. For most of the twentieth century it was shops and offices. Today it is a house again, two houses in fact, just as it was after 1830: Yoward House and Snicklegate next door. The building is listed Grade II*.

The house takes its name from the man who built it. Yoward House honours Ralph Yoward, whose initials are still on the front of the house nearly three centuries later.

A heritage-led restoration

Rather than stripping away its individuality, the restoration embraced the building's heritage. Original features, exposed historic timbers and period detailing sit alongside traditional craftsmanship and carefully chosen materials.