Nearest Online Tour Guide page: Duncombe Place or St Helen’s Square
The Assembly Rooms on York’s Blake Street have been called the earliest neo-classical building in Europe and one of the most influential pieces of architecture of the early 18th century.
Inside York's Assembly Rooms
The rooms were built in the early 1730s by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, to provide a dancing venue for York’s burgeoning social scene. During the first half of the eighteenth century York became the de facto social capital of the North, with assemblies (dances) held on Mondays at King’s Manor or in the mansion of Lord Irwin, a local nobleman.
Burlington was the second choice of architect for York’s fashionable set when they decided to build a dedicated room for their assemblies, but he proved an excellent choice. A devotee of Palladio, the Italian who re-invented the architectural traditions of ancient Rome for enlightenment Europe, Burlington reconstructed Rome’s Egyptian Hall, as Palladio had imagined it after reading a contemporary description by Vitruvius.
Architecture of the Assembly Rooms
The front exterior is dominated by a portico featuring four columns with ionic capitals, flanked by pairs of pilasters, again with ionic capitals – textbook nods to Palladio’s work (although Burlington’s original façade and portico were replaced by the present façade in 1828). The otherwise plain stone little hints at the glorious interior.
Exterior of the Assembly Rooms
The original design was for a large room for dances, a smaller one for cards and gaming tables, a room for refreshments and a kitchen. This has been altered over the years, but without spoiling the focal point of the building: the Grand Assembly Room.
This large, airy space is a superb example of neo-classical architecture, from the Corinthian columns to the clerestorey of windows rising from the roof they support. Composite pilasters complement the line of each column, in perfect harmony with the precepts of ancient Roman architecture (and as can be seen on, say, Rome’s Coliseum).
The room has been kept faithfully decorated, with gold leaf on the capitals, marble effect on the plaster that covers the stone columns, and a plain wood floor.
The building is maintained by the York Conservation Trust and is hence open to the public free of charge. It now hosts an Ask pizza restaurant; visitors don’t have to have a glass of wine and a meal but it’s thoroughly recommended if you want to imagine what life was like for York’s Georgian nobility. Personally, I can’t imagine a better room in which to enjoy a meal.
The Assembly Rooms and York Races
Work began on the Assembly Rooms in 1730; it is hardly coincidental that the first horseracing meeting on the Knavesmire was held in 1731. The Assembly Rooms saw their first taste of Georgian nightlife during Race Week in 1732 – a race meeting that lives on today as the Ebor Festival.
The Assembly Rooms opened properly in 1735, by which time York’s Race Week was firmly embedded in the northern fashionable set’s social calendar, giving rise to York’s nickname as “the Ascot of the North”.