Quirk, Rest And Play

What is it that makes york’s bishopthorpe road so special? Jo haywood (a former south banker herself) revisits to find out.

- Jo haywood

BISHOPTHORPE Road on York’s South Bank is partial to a party. (That’s partial in the same way that Jeremy Clarkson quite likes cars and Elizabeth Taylor was a tiny bit keen on diamonds.)

The traders and locals first got the bash-holding bug in 2010 when they closed the street and opened their arms to welcome Greenpeace.

At the time, the street had reached something of a low ebb. The Terry’s factory had closed down, the post office had gone, there were seven empty shops and the recession had started to bite hard. At a bit of a loss as to what to do, a few of the traders went along to a conference hosted by Greenpeace in the city centre.

‘They talked about closing streets to traffic and throwing them open to community events,’ said Johnny Hayes, co-owner of Frankie & Johnny’s Cookshop on Bishopthorpe Road since 1999, when he left the house to buy a tin of undercoat and came back with a shop (ask him the details next time you’re in – he tells it better than us). ‘We were intrigued by the idea so we invited them to set up an event in our street. Frankly, we didn’t expect much, but we closed the street at 6pm and 15 minutes later there were 3,000 people on Bishy Road. That was our eureka moment.’

Johnny, who doesn’t like to blow his own trumpet but actually deserves a full brass section for his efforts, went on to set up Bishy Road Traders’ Association, a tight-knit, supportive group hellbent on breathing new life into what could easily have become yet another grim parade of charity shops and broken windows.