2-8, ST HELENS SQUARE (See details for further address information)

Nos 2-8 (Even) St Helen's Square, York, including No. 2 Davygate

Bank, restaurant, shops and offices built in 1929-30, designed by T P Bennett.

The building is constructed of red brick in Flemish bond with sandstone ashlar, including ashlar dressings. The shopfronts are of ashlar with bronze window frames. The parapet is of brick panels interrupted by balustraded lengths between piers of brick or ashlar, topped with moulded stone coping. The roof is of Westmorland slate, hipped at each end, with brick stacks. At the centre stands a pilastraded octagonal cupola with a lead ogee cap, surmounted by a wrought-iron finial and weathervane.

The exterior consists of three storeys. The St Helen's Square front has nine bays, the Davygate front has nine bays, the Coney Street front has four bays, and there are tripartite curved corner bays at the intersection. The upper floors to St Helen's Square are articulated by giant Ionic pilasters. The centre bay is treated as a frontispiece with coupled columns and pilasters supporting a plain frieze and moulded modillion cornice which breaks forward over the outer bays, with a broken central pediment containing a garlanded cartouche of York City arms in the tympanum. The shopfronts feature plain pilasters with moulded bases and capitals, and a broad fascia beneath a moulded cornice on triglyph brackets.

No. 2 has panelled double doors in the corner bay, set in an architrave of slender pilaster jambs beneath a fluted frieze and moulded cornice, with a pediment formed of volutes and palmette. The overlight is divided by squat pilasters with palmette bases. A similar door is located at the left end. Small-pane fixed-light windows are made tripartite by pilasters beneath fluted friezes and moulded cornices, with transom lights divided as door overlights and risers of moulded raised panelling between fluted pilaster strips. The shopfront to No. 4 has been altered. The entrance to Nos 6 and 8 in the Davygate return is a glazed open metalwork panel of geometric design in a brass surround, with a glass and bronze canopy above. A subsidiary glass door to the St Helen's Square front is positioned at the right end of plate glass windows with top panels of coloured glass; the lower part of the windows is protected by a balustrade of open metalwork panels similar to that in the main door. Coloured glass panels in the canopy and window heads are leaded with an abstracted leaf trail design. The shopfront returns on the Davygate front and incorporates a service passage gate and screen of square section railings at the left end.

The frontispiece on St Helen's Square has tripartite sash windows on the first and second floors. The first floor window has a keyed Gibbs surround beneath a moulded cornice on consoles; the second floor centre window is radial-glazed in a round-arched keyed and eared architrave, with a moulded sill over a shaped apron. Elsewhere, first floor windows are generally 18-pane sashes with flat arches of gauged brick; second floor windows are 12-pane sashes with tiled sills over raised brick aprons. In the corner bays and some other locations, first floor windows have triple-keyed architraves with broken pedimented hoods on scrolled consoles, and second floor windows have moulded stone sills over moulded aprons.

The interiors were not inspected.