A large lecture hall attached to the west side of the Yorkshire Museum was opened in 1912, the result of a donation from the President of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, Dr Tempest Anderson, or from his family. Dr Anderson was by profession a medic specialising in ophthalmology, but latterly a geologist devoted to volcanoes. His two interests are combined in the large collection of photographs of volcanic eruptions that he left to the Society (Spriggs 2022). The hall was named after him when he died in 1913.
Left: Exterior door to the hall. Right: The basement gallery of the Museum where some of the ruins of the old abbey are now sheltered beneath the raked seating of the lecture hall, one level above.
The hall was designed by Edwin Ridsdale Tate (1862-1922), using reinforced concrete as well as stone to a Grecian design (Pevsner and Neave 180). In 1909, the profits from a pageant had been put towards caring for the ruins of St Mary's Abbey, on the site of the Museum, and in a report of 1910 by the curator and mineralogist Henry Maurice Platnauer (1857-1939) and the architect and antiquarian George Benson (1856-1935), the society had been made formally aware of the mechanical and physical damage suffered by the exposed medieval stonework. The building of the lecture hall enabled a partial solution to that problem. The vestibule to the chapter house of the abbey, “which was formerly open and exposed to all the ravages of smoke, frost and tempest, has been covered in [by the lecture hall above], the floor drained and concreted, and converted into one of the most interesting portions of the Museum. Into this chamber has been removed and suitably exhibited the unrivalled collection of medieval stonework which had hitherto been almost unnoticed in the lower part of the Hospitium” (YPSAR for 1912).
Links to Related Material
- The Formation of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society
- The Yorkshire Museum, by William Wilkins
- Interior of the Yorkshire Museum
- Museum Lodge
- York Observatory, by J. P. Pritchett, and the Buckingham Works
- Manor Cottage, Henry Baines' House
- Museum Gardens, York
- The Conservation of St Mary's Abbey's Ruins in the Yorkshire Museum's Grounds
Photographs by the author, 2023. [You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web project or cite it in a print one. Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Bibliography
Pevsner, Nikolaus, and David Neave. Yorkshire: York and the East Riding. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.
Spriggs, J. “Yorkshire Scientist: Tempest Anderson”, YPSAR for the Year 2021, 50-52.
YPSAR: The early Yorkshire Philosophical Society's Annual Reports.
Created 23 August 2023
Last modified 2 September 2023