NEWS that the RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture last month went to a modern reimagining of the traditional almshouse in Southwark, London, has resonance for our fair city.
York holds one of the country’s richest concentrations of historic almshouses and shows how centuries of philanthropy and design can still guide us today.
Almshouses – charitable housing for people in need, often older or widowed – have deep roots in York. From small widow’s cottages to grand Georgian façades, they chart the city’s evolving balance between charity, architecture and social welfare.
York can even claim England’s first almshouse, founded around 936AD in the time of King Athelstan, later becoming St Leonard’s Hospital. While this oldest example may no longer survive, York has one of the earliest still in its original form – Ingram House – and an unusually dense variety of later types.
Ingram House on Bootham dates from the 1630s. It was built by Sir Arthur Ingram for “ten poor York widows” in red brick with a distinctive tower and reused Norman doorway from the old Priory off Micklegate. Residents once received stipends and gowns – a rare example of organised social housing centuries before the welfare state. It embodies early modern charity in architectural form and remains a powerful symbol of civic generosity.
Women were central to York’s almshouse story. Lady Sarah Hewley’s almshouses on St Saviourgate were founded in 1700 and endowed for “poor Protestant women,” mostly non-conformists, and the trust continues today.
Dorothy Wilson’s 1719 foundation supported ten women and educated 20 boys, with a handsome Georgian building by Foss Bridge.
Lady Ann Middleton, widow of a York sheriff, left provision for 20 widows of freemen. Her almshouse on Skeldergate was rebuilt in 1829 to include a garden courtyard and survives as Middletons Hotel. These benefactors worked in an age when few women could act publicly – philanthropy, even in death, offered a rare path to civic influence.
Mary Wandesford’s bequest provided homes for unmarried women over fifty. Wandesford House (1739–43), set back from Bootham, is a fine seven-bay classical façade, complete with a statue of its benefactor. Its architectural dignity showed that social care was built to last – and to be seen. Similarly, Ingram House, built in durable brick when most of York was still timber, demonstrated quality and permanence as moral virtues.
The Stirling Prize-winning Appleby Blue Almshouse also received this year’s Neave Brown Award for social inclusion, highlighting a truth York has long known – good housing is about connection as much as construction. Almshouses combine independence with shared space and dignity with community – a humane middle ground between isolation and institutional care.
The prize also shows that such pastoral buildings, especially those designed to combat loneliness, are far from relics – they remain a model for modern living. The Heslington Almshouses Charity still offers accommodation for older women in need or hardship, recently adding a small bungalow to its village cluster. The Jane Wright Almshouses in Ogleforth, founded in 1675, now provides 11 self-contained flats around a communal courtyard – a modern interpretation of a 17th-century idea. Both show how centuries-old trusts evolve to meet contemporary need: modest, independent dwellings bound by community.
Twentieth century examples of York almshouses include John Burrill Almshouses on Clifton Green, and the John Hunt Memorial Homes on Fulford Road. They offer formally set living around generous communal green spaces. Such almshouses help form a continuous thread through the city’s story: medieval bedes-houses, Georgian terraces, Victorian rebuilds and modern adaptations. This charitable trust model – endowment, trustees and oversight – has endured longer than many institutions of the state.
These schemes show that almshouses are not heritage curiosities but active parts of York’s housing ecology. In an age of ageing populations and stretched welfare budgets, their model of small-scale philanthropy offers lessons for new development and civic planning alike.
For some, such private generosity might feel uncomfortably close to an American model of philanthropy, risking dilution of the welfare state’s aims. Yet high standards of design and care from this charitable tradition can serve as a benchmark for all forms of provision. Planners and designers could take cues from their enduring features – courtyards, gardens, modest scale and neighbourliness – when shaping later-life housing.
York’s almshouses reveal an unbroken lineage of compassion in brick and mortar. They remind us that community can be designed, endowed and sustained – and that some of the most humane ideas in housing are, in truth, the oldest.
Duncan Marks is the planning and heritage manager of York Civic Trust