Summary
Shop with accommodation over, early to mid-C19, altered C20.
History
Selby as a settlement dates to the Anglo-Saxon period, when it was known as Seletun (old Scandinavian for ‘sallow tree settlement’) and was referred by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of AD 779. A charter of about 1030 called it Seleby and about 1050 it was Selbi. King Henry I was born in Selby in 1068 and, a year later, Benedict, a French monk from Auxerre, obtained permission from King William to establish an Abbey. The Market Place has existed since the early C14. By the C15, Selby had developed thriving trade links along the East Coast and with the Low Countries. Selby Abbey succumbed to dissolution in 1539, and the core of the building became the parish church in 1618.
Selby’s commercial importance grew dramatically following the opening of the Selby Canal in 1778, becoming a notable inland port; however, after the building of Goole Docks in 1826, it suffered a very rapid decline. The town’s fortunes recovered in 1834, with the opening of the Leeds and Selby Railway, and by the early C20, witnessed a growth in several industries served by the railways and river traffic, including: flour milling, malting, oilseed milling and cattle feed production. In 1983, coal production commenced from the Selby Coalfield. Shipbuilding ended ten years later, and coal mining ceased in 2004. Since then, there has been a gradual reduction in the traditional industries, although some remain.
Church Hill forms a small open square that would once have been occupied by traders’ stalls, and connects the historic riverfront of Selby with the Abbey Church and the town centre. The existing building appears to have been built as a shop development during the mid-C19, shown on historic maps with a narrow yard containing warehousing and courtyard housing, situated to its rear. Given the width of the plot, the building probably replaced a late-medieval or C17 house that conformed to the pattern set by the burgage plots along the river front. The courtyard extended some 15.5m to the rear and backed onto properties that once stood in Richardson’s Court, which were demolished during the mid-1970s; it is accessed by a passageway to the right of the shop, which also gives access to the rear of other properties on Church Hill.
Details
Shop with accommodation over, early to mid-C19, altered C20.
MATERIALS: fair-faced brick, slate roof to front range, pantile roof to rear range.
PLAN: front range aligned roughly east-west, with canted north wall, and long rear range extending 14.5m to the south-west.
EXTERIOR: facing north onto the street. The three-storey, two-bay facade is in English Garden Wall bond brickwork, and cants away slightly beyond bay 1. The ground floor has a double-fronted shopfront, with the recessed central entrance in bay 2 (with mosaic floor), flanked by glazed window panels. The shopfront has fluted and panelled pilasters, with consoles that have gabled caps to either side of a canted fascia, below a billeted cornice. The corner posts are turned above transom level, and the transoms are moulded, with four hooks fixed to the right-hand transom. The shopfront has C20 glazing bars (three panes to the left, two to the right), with a low broad timber sill, above a shallow stall riser. The first and second floors each have two flush-framed four-pane casement windows set in moulded surrounds, with slightly projecting painted stone sills, and wedge lintels. The pitched roof has a brick ridge chimney stack at each end and is drained by plastic rainwater goods, attached to a timber eaves board.
