Yorkshire Museum, Tempest Anderson Hall And St Marys Abbey Remains

Yorkshire Museum, Tempest Anderson Hall and St Mary's Abbey Remains, York

A museum and lecture hall incorporating significant medieval abbey remains in the basement. The building complex comprises two principal structures: the Yorkshire Museum, built 1827-29 by William Wilkins for the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and Tempest Anderson Hall, a lecture hall built in 1912 by E Ridsdale Tate, also for the same society. Both buildings have undergone later alterations.

The museum is constructed of ashlar with a slate roof, shallow pitched and partly glazed, topped with stone stacks. It presents a single-storey, nine-bay front elevation on a low plinth, dominated by a pedimented tetrastyle portico of fluted Greek Doric columns standing on a stepped podium. The central double doors, formed of six sunk panels in a moulded surround, are crowned by a cornice hood on scroll brackets. Flanking these doors are narrow eight-pane sashes, with twelve-pane sashes elsewhere, all set in architraves with cornice hoods and positioned above a moulded sill band. A boldly projecting cornice runs across the full width of the front and beneath the parapet. A plaque within the portico records that the Yorkshire Philosophical Society transferred the Yorkshire Museum and Gardens to the Citizens of York on 2 January 1961.

Tempest Anderson Hall is built of shuttered concrete and rises two storeys with an additional basement beneath the left two bays. A single-storey projecting porch with a high plinth extends toward the right end. Both the main front and right return are articulated with giant-order Doric pilasters and antae supporting a full entablature and parapet. The porch features similar articulation with a heavy moulded cornice to its flat roof. Steps lead to panelled double doors beneath a flat canopy on scroll brackets in the left return. The front displays a small-pane window in an eared architrave with moulded sill, flanked by pilasters. The fenestration is irregular, reflecting variable floor levels. One basement window has been altered to a square bay with plate glazing; the remainder are two-mullioned small-pane lights with metal glazing bars. Upper windows are generally one-pane fixed lights, some with transoms, set in moulded architraves with moulded sills over sunk-panel aprons. At the right end of the cornice, integral rainwater goods include a hopper initialled "TA" and dated 1912.

The museum interior retains significant features. The basement galleries contain a reconstruction of the Chapter House vestibule of St Mary's Abbey, incorporating original remains. The original triple-arched entrance screen features piers carved with chevron and stiff-leaf mouldings and detached shafts with waterhold bases and spurs. The vaulting piers have alternately filleted and keeled shafts with roll-moulded bases. The base courses of the slype incorporate a wallbench and remains of four buttresses with attached shafts, moulded bases and capitals. The base courses of the north wall of the parlour incorporate bases of vaulting shafts. A separate room preserves the hearth, one moulded jamb and a carved corbel head to the lintel of the Warming House fireplace.

On the ground and first floors, the altered interior retains a four-bay central area colonnaded in giant-order Composite columns and responds, supporting a ceiling coffered with beams enriched with guilloche and egg-and-dart mouldings. Ceiling panels behind the colonnades contain moulded rosettes. The staircase to the first floor features an open string, stick balusters, a serpentine handrail and turned newels on shaped curtail steps.

The abbey remains incorporated into the basement comprise vestiges of a late twelfth-century Chapter House vestibule screen and vaulting shafts from 1298-1307, a late thirteenth-century slype, an early fourteenth-century parlour and a late fourteenth-century Warming House.