York Poem by John Rickell

The Board Inn at the end of Pavement
scrubbed bar top and saw-dustfloor
Bass and only Bass, a real ale
handles on the glass....
Pulled down years ago,
as was the slum of Hungate by the Foss
Dank and dark shunned and rats
now Texan hats and foreign tongues
where once was poverty's ragged mantle.
St Saviours Church was never locked,
now closed, the organ gone.


The City middin for a thousand years;
tall houses in the fifties, barking dogs
leaking roof to floor, Dickensian,
like the work-house down the road
crammed with despair and loathing
a hundred years and more.
They felled it in the sixties
now it’s called Stonebow,
the Board Inn gone.
Archaeologists digging in the mud
beside the river bank
finding Viking pots and pans
leather shoes and buckles
a pier and landing stage
cobbles and the like.

They'll build a museum,
line walls with charts and pictures,
will they can the smells behind the Inn,
hear the bare foot children?
Where did they go, I do not recall their going,
remember this was in the fifties,
I was in my teens dare not enter Hungate
until they pulled it down.
Bars and crowded pavements now
The ancient town a bustle.
Coffee smells and city walls,
All Saints Pavement. lantern tower
once to guide those lost in Gaultres forest
The Minster bell at noon.